Page:Vance--The rass bowl.djvu/382

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THE BRASS BOWL

She was recovering, whose high spirit and recuperative powers were to him then and always remained a marvelous thing; and she was bending forth from the body of the hansom to welcome him with a smile that in a twinkling made radiant the world to him who stood in a gloomy side street of New York at three o'clock of a summer's morning,—a good hour and a half before the dawn. For up there in the tower of the sky-scraper he had as much as told her of his love; and she had waited; and now—and now he had been blind indeed had he failed to read the promise in her eyes. Weary she was and spent and overwrought; but there is no tonic in all the world like the consciousness that where one has placed one's love, there love has burgeoned in response. And despite all that she had suffered and endured, the happiness that ran like soft fire in her Veins, wrapping her being with its beneficent rapture, had deepened the color in her cheeks and heightened the glamour in her eyes.

And he stood and stared, knowing that in all time to no man had ever woman seemed more lovely than

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