“Ellen, I won’t let you go alone,” said the young man, as a wilder gust came.  “Suppose you should fall down?”

“Fall down!” repeated Ellen, with a laugh, but her regard of the young man, in spite of her rebuff, was tender.  He touched her with his unfailing devotion; the heavy trudging by her side of this poor man meant, she told herself, much more than the invitation of the rich one to ride behind his bays in his luxurious sleigh.  This meant the very bone and sinew of love.  She held out her little, mittened hand to him.

“Good-night, Granville,” she said.

Granville caught it eagerly.  “Oh, Ellen,” he murmured.

But she withdrew her hand quickly.  “We have always been good friends, and we always will be,” said she, and her tone was unmistakable.  The young man shrank back.

“Yes, we always will, Ellen,” he said, in a faithful voice, with a note of pain in it.

“Good-night,” said Ellen again.

“Good-night,” responded Granville, and turned his plodding back on the girl and retraced his laborious steps towards his own home, which he had just passed.  There come times for all souls when the broad light of the path of humanity seems to pale to insignificance before the intensity of the one little search-light of personality.  Granville Joy felt as if the eternal problem of the rich and poor, of labor and capital, of justice and equality, was as nothing before the desire of his heart for that one girl who was disappearing from his sight behind the veil of virgin snow.

Chapter L

When Ellen came in sight of her house that night she saw her father’s bent figure moving down the path with sidewise motions of a broom.  He had been out at short intervals all the afternoon, that she should not have to wade through drifts to the door.  The electric-light shone full on this narrow, cleared track and the toiling figure.

“Hullo, father!” Ellen called out.  Andrew turned, and his face lit with love and welcome and solicitude.

“Be you dreadful snowy?” he asked.

“Oh no, father, not very.”

“It’s an awful storm.”

“Pretty bad, but I got along all right.  The snow-plough has been out.”

“Wait a minute till I get this swept,” said Andrew, sweeping violently before her.

“You needn’t have bothered, father,” said Ellen.

“I ’ain’t anything else to do,” replied Andrew, in a sad voice.

“There’s mother watching,” said Ellen.

“Yes, she’s been diggin’ at them wrappers all day.”

“I suppose she has,” Ellen returned, in a bitter tone.  Her father stared at her.  Ellen never spoke like that.  For the first time she echoed him and her mother.  Something like terror came over him at the sound of that familiar note of his own life from this younger one.  He seemed to realize dimly that a taint of his nature had descended upon his child.