She leaned her head back in her chair, and looked at a star through a gap in the vines. The shadows of the leaves played over her long, white figure. Again to Risley, gazing at her, came the conviction as of subtle spiritual deformity in the woman; she was unnatural in something the same fashion that an orchid is unnatural, and it was worse, because presumably the orchid does not know it is an orchid and regret not being another, more evenly developed, flower, and Cynthia had a full realization and a mental mirror clear enough to see the twist in her own character. Risley had never kissed her in his life, but that night, when they parted, he laid a hand on her soft, gray hair, and smoothed it back with a masculine motion of tenderness, leaving her white forehead, which had a candid, childish fulness about the temples, bare. Then he put his lips to it. "You are a silly girl, Cynthia," he said. "I wish I were different, Lyman," she responded, and, he felt, with a double meaning. "I don't," he said, and stroked her hair with a great tenderness, which seemed for the time to quite fill and satisfy his heart. He was a man of measureless patience, born to a firm conviction of the journey's end. "There are worse things than loving a good woman your whole life and never having her," he said to himself as he went home, but he said it without its full meaning. Risley's "nerves" were always lighted by the lamp of his own hope, which threw a gleam over unknown seas. Chapter XXVI Robert Lloyd accompanied Ellen home, though she had said timidly that she was not in the least afraid, that she would not trouble any one, that she could take a car. Cynthia herself had insisted that Robert should escort her. "It's too late for you to be out alone," she said, and the girl seemed to perceive dimly a hedge of conventionality which she had not hitherto known. She had often taken a car when she was alone of an evening, without a thought of anything questionable. Some of the conductors lived near Ellen, and she felt as if she were under personal friendly escort. "I know the conductor on that car, and it would take me right home, and I am not in the least afraid," she said to Robert, as the car came rocking down the street when they emerged from Cynthia's grounds. "It's a lovely night," Robert said, speaking quickly as they paused on the sidewalk. "I am not going to let you go alone, anyway. We will take the car if you say so, but what do you say to walking? It's a lovely night." It actually flashed through Ellen's mind--to such small issues of finance had she been accustomed--that the young man might insist upon paying her car-fare if he went with her on the car. "I would like to walk, but I am sorry to put you to so much trouble," she said, a little awkwardly.