Page:Arthur Stringer-The Loom of Destiny.djvu/206

The Loom of Destiny passed up the crowded thoroughfare without so much as seeing him. He watched the carriage fade away up the Avenue, swallowed up by the stream that surged about it. A sickening sense of loneliness and desertion overcame him, and a sudden gush of tears welled to his eyes.

There was still a chance that she would come back again, but he knew the Angel had forgotten him. For the first time in his childish life, waiting there at the curb for the Woman He Loved, he felt the wordless soul-hunger of loneliness.

She did at last come back. It was almost dusk when the child again caught sight of her carriage sweeping back down the Avenue. She sat back in the deep seat, seeing nothing and looking far into the distance.

Teddie, in a mad sort of despair, waved at her and then called out to her. But she neither saw nor heard.

Then a sudden thought, intoxicating as wine, ran through the child's mind. The thought that he should lose her for all time made life itself a trivial thing. 194