Page:Saxe Holm's Stories, Series Two.djvu/63

Rh the stormy break in it put away forever. Margaret's heart leaped with a sudden rapture in the consciousness that she still had the same quiet, peaceful, dear home as before.

Again the spring and the summer wore away, and the winter came, and no change was visible in Wilhelm Reutner's household. No change visible! But ah! beneath its surface had again been at work far deeper forces than those which ripen spring into summer, and summer into the garnered harvest of autumn.

Margaret loved Karl! What subtle triumphs love knows how to win for his own! Karl Reutner's heart had no more hope in it now than it had a year before; no less now than then, it would have seemed to him like blasphemy to ask Margaret Warren to be his wife: yet there were days when Margaret could not see daisies without tears, so bitterly did her heart ache to recall the hour in which she had rejected the love which they had once symbolized to her.

It was hard to tell how this love had come. Its growth had been as slow, as uninterrupted, as immutable, as unsuspected as the silent growth of crystals deep hidden in chambers of stone. It was long before Margaret had dreamed of it, and very long before she had admitted it to herself. She wrestled with it bravely; it was against her will, she did not choose to love Karl Reutner. She was no less proud a woman this year than last.