Page:Middle Aged Love Stories (IA middleagedlove00bacorich).djvu/138

 shade of jealousy with which her colleagues assured her of it. How long must she wait? When would life be real again?

She seemed to herself to move in a dream that heightened and strained quicker as it neared an inevitable shock of waking—to what? Even at the best, to what? Even supposing that—she put it boldly, as if it had been another woman—she should marry the man who had asked her seven years ago, what was there in the very obvious future thus assured her that could match the hopes her heart held out? How could it be at once the golden harbor, the peaceful end of hurried, empty years, and the delicious, shifting unrest that made a tumult of her days and nights? Yet something told her that it was; something repeated insistently, “Always I will wait.”... He would keep faith, that grave, big man!

But every day, as she moved with tightened lips to the table where the mail