“You haven’t asked me about him,” she said unexpectedly.

“I thought you would not care to talk about him.  That’s over and done, Lily.  I want to forget about it, myself.”

She looked up at him, and had he had Louis Akers’ intuitive knowledge of women he would have understood then.

“I am never going back to him, Willy.  You know that, don’t you?”

“I hoped it, of course.”

“I know now that I never loved him.”

But the hurt of her marriage was still too fresh in him for speech.  He could not discuss Louis Akers with her.

“No,” he said, after a moment, “I don’t think you ever did.  I’ll come in some evening, if I may, Lily.  I must not keep you up now.”

How old he looked, for him!  How far removed from those busy, cheerful days at the camp!  And there were new lines of repression in his face; from the nostrils to the corners of his mouth.  Above his ears his hair showed a faint cast of gray.

“You have been having rather a hard time, Willy, haven’t you’?” she said, suddenly.

“I have been busy, of course.”

“And worried?”

“Sometimes.  But things are clearing up now.”

She was studying him with the newly opened eyes of love.  What was it he showed that the other men she knew lacked?  Sensitiveness?  Kindness?  But her father was both sensitive and kind.  So was Pink, in less degree.  In the end she answered her own question, and aloud.

“I think it is patience,” she said.  And to his unspoken question:  “You are very patient, aren’t you?”

“I never thought about it.  For heaven’s sake don’t turn my mind in on myself, Lily.  I’ll be running around in circles like a pup chasing his tail.”

He made a movement to leave, but she seemed oddly reluctant to let him go.

“Do you know that father says you have more influence than any other man in the city?”

“That’s more kind than truthful.”

“And—­I think he and grandfather are planning to try to get you, when the mills reopen.  Father suggested it, but grandfather says you’d have the presidency of the company in six months, and he’d be sharpening your lead pencils.”

Suddenly Willy Cameron laughed, and the tension was broken.

“If he did it with his tongue they’d be pretty sharp,” he said.

For just a moment, before he left, they were back to where they had been months ago, enjoying together their small jokes and their small mishaps.  The present fell away, with its hovering tragedy, and they were boy and girl together.  Exaltation and sacrifice were a part of their love, as of all real and lasting passion, but there was always between them also that soundest bond of all, liking and comradeship.

“I love her.  I like her.  I adore her,” was the cry in Willy Cameron’s heart when he started home that night.

CHAPTER XLIV