Granville looked at her blankly.  They were coming into the crowded, brilliantly lighted main street of the city, and their two faces were quite plain to each other’s eyes.

“No, I don’t,” said he.  “What is it, Ellen?”

“She is going to send me to Vassar College.”

Granville’s face whitened perceptibly.  There was a queer sound in his throat.

“To Vassar College!” he repeated.

“Yes, to Vassar College.  Then I shall be able to get a good school, and teach, and help father and mother.”

Granville continued to look at her, and suddenly an intense pity sprang into life in the girl’s heart.  She felt as if she were looking at some poor little child, instead of a stalwart young man.

“Don’t look so, Granville,” she said, softly.

“Of course I am glad at any good fortune which can come to you, Ellen,” Granville said then, huskily.  His lips quivered a little, but his eyes on her face were brave and faithful.  Suddenly Ellen seemed to see in this young man a counterpart of her own father.  Granville had a fine, high forehead and contemplative outlook.  He had been a good scholar.  Many said that it was a pity he had to leave school and go to work.  It had been the same with her father.  Andrew had always looked immeasurably above his labor.  She seemed to see Granville Joy in the future just such a man, a finer animal harnessed to the task of a lower, and harnessed in part by his own loving faithfulness towards others.  Ellen had often reflected that, if it hadn’t been for her and her mother, her father would not have been obliged to work so hard.  Now in Granville she saw another man whom love would hold to the ploughshare.  A great impulse of loyalty as towards her own came over her.

“It won’t make any difference between me and my old friends if I do go to Vassar College,” she said, without reflecting on the dangerous encouragement of it.

“You can’t get into another track of life without its making a difference,” returned Granville, soberly.  “But I am glad.  God knows I’m glad, Ellen.  I dare say it is better for you than if—­” He stopped then and seemed all at once to see projected on his mirror of the future this dainty, exquisite girl, with her fine intellect, dragging about a poor house, with wailing children in arm and at heel, and suddenly a great courage of renunciation came over him.

“It is better, Ellen,” he said, in a loud voice, like a hero’s, as if he were cheering his own better impulses on to victory over his own passions.  “It is better for a girl like you, than to—­”

Ellen knew that he meant to say, “to marry a fellow like me.”  Ellen looked at him, the sturdy backward fling of his head and shoulders, and the honest regard of his pained yet unflinching eyes, and a great weakness of natural longing for that which she was even now deprecating nearly overswept her.  She was nearer loving him that moment than ever before.  She realized something in him which could command love—­the renunciation of love for love’s sake.