She glanced up at Adams as he walked beside her in the pale sunshine, and the smile with which he responded to her look, awoke in her the impulse to confess to him the burden which oppressed her thoughts.  Realising that it would be impossible to confide these things to any human being, she changed the subject by asking him a trivial question about Trent’s play.

“There’s no doubt of his success, I think,” he answered, “but just now his mind is absorbed with other things.  He’s as deep in his love as he ever was in his ambition.”

“So he has found her?” enquired Laura, with but little animation.  She was glad that Trent was happy at last, but she could not force herself to feel an interest in this love affair which was so unlike her own.

“Well, he didn’t have to look far,” rejoined Adams, laughing, “he discovered her, I believe, in the same apartment house.  Some of us,” he concluded a little sadly, “go a good deal farther with considerably less success.”

“It does puzzle one,” said Laura, thinking of Kemper, “that some people should find what they want lying on their very doorstep, while others must go on looking for it their whole lives through.”

He smiled at her with a tenderness which seemed, somehow, a part of his strength.  “But yours was the easier fate,” he said.

“Is it the easier?  I hardly know,” she answered, and the note of pain in her voice entered his heart.  “I sometimes think that the best of life is to go on wanting till one dies.”

“Not the best—­not the best,” he responded, with a touch of his whimsical humour.  “I have had my share of wanting and I speak of what I know.  It all comes right in the end, I suppose, but it’s a pretty tough experience while it lasts, and, after all, we live in the minute not in eternity.”

Her gaze had dropped away from him, but at his words she lifted her eyes again to meet his look.

“I wonder what it was you wanted so,” she said—­for he impressed her suddenly as possessing a force of will which it would be not only ineffectual, but even foolish to resist.  The aggressive bulk of Perry Bridewell, the impetuous egoism of Kemper showed, not as strength, but as violence compared to the power which controlled the man at her side.  Where had he found this power? she wondered, and by what miracle had he been able to make it his own?

“If I told you, I dare say it wouldn’t enlighten you much,” he answered.  “Isn’t it enough to confess that I’ve done my share of crying for the moon?”

“And if it had dropped into your hands, you would have found, probably, that it was made only of green cheese,” she replied.

For an instant he looked at her with a glance in which his humour seemed to cover a memory which she could not grasp.

“Oh, well, I’d have risked it!” he retorted almost gayly.

CHAPTER X