“I am glad I met you to-night--but I must not see you again. The people here would never understand it. But it pleases me that you came here; it brings you”--she hesitated--“it brings you nearer, some way, your being here in my country.” “That’s why I came--because it is your country. We were at Gettysburg, Joe and I, and looking down on the battlefield where men had died, I thought of what they did there, and that brought back what you had said about labour; so I started for this place, knowing that if I could win my way to my own respect anywhere it would be here. And here I am, and I shall stay a while longer. Walsh will take me when I want to go--but I’m not sure of myself yet.” “If I have helped, I am glad,” she said. He had kept her hand while he spoke, for this might be a long good-bye; and she laid her other hand lightly on his, an instant only, but his whole being tingled at the contact. It was only a fleeting touch of hands, but they were nearer that moment than they had ever been before. They had gone far since that autumn afternoon when she had spurned him indignantly in the art gallery at Pittsburg. He lay awake until past midnight, thinking of her. Strangely enough, in spite of her reaffirmed obligation to Joe, she seemed less unattainable, more nearly of a world he knew. And as he sought words to express their relation to each other, they took this form: If there be, as men say, real differences that power and place and wealth create between man and man, she might never have attained to the station to which he was born; but by the sweat of his face he had climbed to hers. CHAPTER XXXVI TWO OLD FRIENDS SEEK WAYNE Joe, swollen with pride at having received a telegram, hurried from the mine to the station with the grime of the pit on his face and his lamp still flaring in his cap. He grinned cheerfully at Walsh and Wingfield as they stepped from the train, the worse for a hot afternoon in a day coach. Wingfield surveyed the town with his habitual austerity as they consulted on the platform. His linen had suffered on the journey and he was conscious of the fact; Walsh, blowing hard, mopped his head freely. The heat of August was trying and no trifling business could have brought these gentlemen to Denbeigh. “We came to see Mr. Craighill; we want to do it privately. Can you fix it?” “Sure I can!” “Understand,” said Wingfield, “that we don’t want to interfere with him or embarrass him in any way. He doesn’t expect us.” Joe commended them to the ’bus driver and, conscious of the dignity conferred upon himself by their arrival, hurried off.