boy, venturing out carelessly along the edges of the weakened ice. Suddenly the ice gives way, the little figure sinks, rises, clutches desperately at a fragment, struggles a moment, is borne along in the relentless flow of the chilly water, stares in vain shoreward, and so sinks again with a look of agony, and is gone.
But whenever this inevitable picture grew before Wade’s eyes, as the drowning figure of his fancy vanished, it suddenly changed features, and presented the face of Mary Damer, perishing beyond succor.
Of course he knew that this was but a morbid vision. Yet that it came at all, and that it so agonized him, proved the force of his new feeling.
He had not analyzed it before. This thought of death became its touchstone.
Men like Wade, strong, healthy, earnest, concentrated, straightforward, isolated, judge men and women as friends or foes at once and once for all. He had recognized in Mary Damer from the first a heart as true, whole, noble, and healthy as his own. A fine instinct had told him that she was waiting for her hero, as he was for his heroine.
So he suddenly loved her. And yet not suddenly; for all his life, and all his lesser forgotten or discarded passions, had been training him for this master one.
He suddenly and strongly loved her; and yet it had only been a beautiful bewilderment of uncomprehended delight, until this haunting vision of her
