But Estelle was thinking of their future.  The delay, the seemingly endless delay, made her even more impatient than it made him, as is always the case where the woman is really in love.  In the man love holds the impetuosity of passion in leash; in the woman it rouses the deeper, the more enduring force of the maternal instinct—­not merely the unconscious or, at most, half-conscious longing for the children that are to be, but the desire to do for the man—­to look after his health, his physical comfort, to watch over and protect him; for, to the woman in love, the man seems in those humble ways less strong than she—­a helpless creature, dependent on her.  “It’s going to be much harder to wait,” said she, “now that you are superintendent and I have bought out Mrs. Hastings’s share of my business.”

They both laughed, but Lorry said:  “It’s no joke.  A little too much money has made fools of as wise people as we are—­many and many’s the time.”

“Not as wise a person as you are, and as you’ll always make me be, or seem to be,” replied Estelle.

Lorry pressed his big hand over hers for an instant.  “Now that I’ve left off real work,” said he, “I’ll soon be able to take your hand without giving you a rough reminder of the difference between us.”

He held out his hands, palms upward.  They were certainly not soft and smooth, but they more than made up in look of use and strength what they lacked in smoothness.  She put her small hands one on either side of his, and they both thrilled with the keen pleasure the touch of edge of hand against edge of hand gave them.  In the ends of her fingers were the marks of her needlework.  He bent and kissed those slightly roughened finger ends passionately.  “I love those marks!” he exclaimed.  “They make me feel that we belong to each other.”

“I’d be sorry to see your hands different,” said she, her eyes shining upon his.  “There are many things you don’t understand about me—­for instance, that it’s just those marks of work that make you so dear to me.  A woman may begin by liking a man because he’s her ideal in certain ways, but once she really cares, she loves whatever is part of him.”

In addition to the reasons she had given for feeling “bolder” about her “plebeian” lover, there was another that was the strongest of all.  A few months before, a cousin of her father’s had died in Boston, where he was the preacher of a most exclusive and fashionable church.  He had endeared himself to his congregation by preaching one Easter Sunday a sermon called “The Badge of Birth.”  In it he proceeded to show from the Scriptures themselves how baseless was the common theory that Jesus was of lowly origin.  “The common people heard Him gladly,” cried the Rev. Eliot Wilmot, “because they instinctively felt His superiority of birth, felt the dominance of His lineage.  In His veins flowed the blood of the royal house of Israel, the blood of the first anointed