Page:Conflict (1927).pdf/112

 And he had made her struggle against him again. And become quiet and willing again.

When Felix got to thinking about the last time he saw Sheilah, he would shove his books away from him and close his eyes, and the sea of his consciousness would rise and fall and billow around him with surging thought-waves of Sheilah. Like great combers. One after another. Mounting high and higher. Threatening to drown him. Would have drowned him, perhaps, but for the carpenter's bench.

Often, when Felix got to thinking too much about Sheilah, he would sit down at his carpenter's bench, and with saw, and chisel, and plane, fashion little things with his hands. And the waves would subside, and Sheilah would withdraw again into the mist.

During the second winter, however, that Felix occupied the room on Greene Street, Sheilah didn't withdraw into the mist when he worked at his carpenter's bench. She couldn't while her very name—her very lovely name—was growing beneath his fingers in white ivory bordered with ebony, planted in satinwood.

He wished he had known early in the fall that Sheilah was coming to the Prom in February, then he could have started his task sooner, and his studying need not have suffered so. The menacing mid-