"You say I'm different from other girls, John. Well, you are different from all other men. Oh, it is so very sweet of you--your silly fear that you can't make me happy--your continual reference to that absurdity. Why, John, I am so happy that I can't express it. No one else could have made me so. I am the luckiest girl in the world." Her throbbing lips invited it, and he bent down and kissed them. He drew her into his arms. She felt his great breast quiver and heard him sigh. Not yet was she comprehending him--not yet was he quite able to comprehend himself. CHAPTER XXIII Among the men of John's trade it was deemed an effeminate thing for a laboring-man to allow his marriage to cut into his duties to his daily work. And as Cavanaugh already had a job waiting, which was the erection of a fine brick residence on a near-by plantation, John joined him, ready for work, on the day following the one of his arrival home. This left Tilly all alone in the cottage. At first she was so absorbed by the changes she was making about the house--the moving of this article or that and the rehanging of the cheap pictures and curtains, that she had little time for self-analysis or a study of her environment. However, after the first three days had passed and there was now nothing in the cottage to be done except to prepare her husband's supper, breakfast, and lunch for his dinner-pail, the time began to drag on her hands. She sat on the little porch nearly all the time, for the outside view was more soothing than the cramped interior of the rather dark little house. Across the vacant lots, and above the dim roofs of the neighboring negro shanties, she saw the smoke from the town's cotton-factories, woolen-mills and iron-foundries, the steam-whistles of which were John's signals for early rising and her own best guide to the approach of nightfall and her husband's longed-for return. Above the trees, an eighth of a mile away, could be seen the roof of Mrs. Trott's house. John had reluctantly pointed it out one evening as they stood at the gate, and every day now she looked at it as the physical symbol of a mystery which was growing more and more inexplicable. She had come to feel that there was something about John's mother which he himself did not fully understand and from which he shrank in morbid and manly sensitiveness.