“I think about two things all the time.  That is one of them.”  Mrs. Wheeler came in with Claude’s four o’clock milk; it was his first day downstairs.

When they were children, playing by the mill-dam, Claude had seen the future as a luminous vagueness in which he and Enid would always do things together.  Then there came a time when he wanted to do everything with Ernest, when girls were disturbing and a bother, and he pushed all that into the distance, knowing that some day he must reckon with it again.

Now he told himself he had always known Enid would come back; and she had come on that afternoon when she entered his drug-smelling room and let in the sunlight.  She would have done that for nobody but him.  She was not a girl who would depart lightly from conventions that she recognized as authoritative.  He remembered her as she used to march up to the platform for Children’s Day exercises with the other little girls of the infant class; in her stiff white dress, never a curl awry or a wrinkle in her stocking, keeping her little comrades in order by the acquiescent gravity of her face, which seemed to say, “How pleasant it is to do thus and to do Right!”

Old Mr. Smith was the minister in those days,—­a good man who had been much tossed about by a stormy and temperamental wife—­and his eyes used to rest yearningly upon little Enid Royce, seeing in her the promise of “virtuous and comely Christian womanhood,” to use one of his own phrases.  Claude, in the boys’ class across the aisle, used to tease her and try to distract her, but he respected her seriousness.

When they played together she was fair-minded, didn’t whine if she got hurt, and never claimed a girl’s exemption from anything unpleasant.  She was calm, even on the day when she fell into the mill-dam and he fished her out; as soon as she stopped choking and coughing up muddy water, she wiped her face with her little drenched petticoats, and sat shivering and saying over and over, “Oh, Claude, Claude!” Incidents like that one now seemed to him significant and fateful.

When Claude’s strength began to return to him, it came overwhelmingly.  His blood seemed to grow strong while his body was still weak, so that the in-rush of vitality shook him.  The desire to live again sang in his veins while his frame was unsteady.  Waves of youth swept over him and left him exhausted.  When Enid was with him these feelings were never so strong; her actual presence restored his equilibrium—­almost.  This fact did not perplex him; he fondly attributed it to something beautiful in the girl’s nature,—­a quality so lovely and subtle that there is no name for it.