Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/133

 Gilman was dying—was dead—struck him through as with a poniard of Jove. He was big enough to forget that it withered his financial hopes. He cared only that it killed a man who had been like a father to him.

He sent flowers. He wrote a note of sympathy to Mrs. Gilman in which humbly and earnestly he told her what her husband had meant to him, a struggling young business man who despite one chance meeting was still to her a stranger. By a very early arrival he got himself into a pew at Christ Church near enough to the mourning family to be able to feed his eyes upon Fay, to notice that she was growing slightly taller and with more rounded curves, but that the proud head was bent today and that the shoulders trembled from time to time. His emotions were deeply touched. He longed to crowd out from his pew and go and sit beside her and offer his heart in consolation. So daring are the dreams of love!

At the cemetery he found himself standing nearer and nearer to the mourning circle of the relatives and immediate friends. Once, for an instant, Fay, as if all at once her sorrow had become too intimate to be shared even with her family, turned from the group, her eyes fixed far on distance.

In this moment, strangely, inexplicably, as if he might have floated there, George Judson