it for my sake that you instructed your lawyers to return good for evil
by redeeming the Farleys' stock just before they left for Colorado, or
that you made restitution to the families of the men at Gordonia for
their losses during the strike."
But again he was shaking his head dubiously.
"I'm not so sure about that. It's in any man to play high when the good
opinion of the one woman is the stake. I'm a _poseur_, like all the
others."
She smiled down on him and the slate-blue eyes were reading him to the
latest-indited heart-line.
"You are posing now," she asseverated. "Don't I know?--don't I always
and always know?" And, after a reflective moment: "It is a great comfort
to be able to love the poses, and a still greater to be permitted to
discern the true man under them."
"I am glad to believe that you don't see quite to the bottom of that
well, Ardea, girl," he said with sudden gravity. "I get only occasional
glimpses, myself, and they make me seasick. I don't believe any man
alive could endure it to look long into the inner abysses of himself."
"'The heart knoweth his own bitterness,'" she quoted, speaking softly;
and then--O rarest of women!--she did not enlarge on it. Instead--
Silence while she was gathering the sweet-smelling tangle in her lap
into some more portable arrangement. And afterward, when they were
drifting slowly homeward in the lengthening shadows, a small asking.
"Mr. Morelock is coming out to-morrow to hold service in St. John's, and
I shall go to play for him. Will you go with me, Tom?"
He smiled out of the gold and sapphire depths of a lover's reverie.
"One week from the day after the day after to-morrow--and it will be the
longest week-and-two-days of my life, dearest--your grandfather will
take you to church, and I shall bring you away. Won't that be enough?"
She took him quite seriously.
"I shall never be a Felicita Young-Dickson, and drag you," she promised.
"But, O Tom! I wish--"
"I know," he said gently. "You are thinking of the days to come; when
the paths may diverge--yours and mine--ever so little; when there may be
children to choose between their mother's faith and their father's
indifference. But I am not indifferent. So far from it, I am only
anxious now to prove what I was once so bent on disproving."
"You yourself are the strongest proof," she interposed. "You will see
it, some day."
"Shall I? I hope so; and that is an honest hope. And really and truly, I
think I have come up a bit--out of the wilderness, you know. I am
willing to admit that this is the best of all possible worlds; and I
want to do my part in making it a little better because I have lived in
it. Also, I'd like to believe in something bigger and better than
protoplasm."
Her smile was of the kind which stands half-way in the path to tears,
but she spoke bravely to the doubt in his reply.
"You do believe, Tom, dear; you have never seen the moment when you did
not. It was the doubt that was unreal. When the supreme test came, it
was God's hand that restrained you; you know it now--you knew it at the
time. And afterward it was His grace that enabled you to do what was
just and right. Haven't you admitted all this to yourself?"
They had crossed the white pike to the manor-house gates and were
turning aside from the driveway into the winding lawn path when he said:
"To myself, and to one other." Then, very softly: "I sat at my mother's
knee last night, Ardea, and told her all there was to tell."
Ardea's eyes were shining. "What did she say, Tom, dear--or is it more
than I should ask?"
"There is nothing you may not ask. She said--it wasn't altogether true,
I'm afraid--but she put her arms around my neck and cried and said: _For
this my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found._"
She slipped her arm in his, and there was a little sob of pure joy at
the catching of her breath. The moon was just rising above the Lebanon
cliff-line, and the beauty of the glorious night-dawn possessed her
utterly. Ah, it was a good world and a generous, bringing rich gifts to
the steadfast! Instinctively she felt that Tom's little confession did
not require an answer; that he was battling his way to the heights which
must be taken alone.
So they came in the sacred hush of the young night to a great tulip-tree
on the lawn, and where a curiously water-worn limestone boulder served
as a rustic seat wide enough for two whose hearts are one they sat down
together, still in the companionship that needs no speech. It was Tom
who first broke the silence.
"I have been trying ever since that night last winter to feel my way
out," he said slowly. "But what is to come of it? I can't go back to the
boyhood yesterdays; in a way I have hopelessly outgrown them. Let us
admit that religion has become real again; but Ardea, girl, it isn't
Uncle Silas's religion, or--or my mother's, or even yours. And I don't
know any other."
She laid a hand on one of his.
"It is all right, dear; there is only the one religion in all
Christendom--perhaps in all the world, or in God's part of it. The
difference is in people."
"But this thing that has been slowly happening to me--this thing I am
trying to call convincement: shall I wake up some day and find it gone,
with all the old doubts in the saddle again?" he asked it almost
wistfully.
"Who can tell?" she said gently. "But it will make no difference; the
immutable fact will be there just the same, whether you are asleep or
waking. We can't always stand on the Mount of Certainty, any of us; and
to some, perhaps, it is never given. But when one saves his enemy's life
and forgives and forgets--O Tom, dear! don't you understand?"
But now his eyes are love-blinded, and the white-gowned figure beside
him fills all horizons.
"I can't see past you, Ardea. Nevertheless, I'm going to believe that I
feel the good old pike solid underfoot ... and they say that the House
Beautiful is somewhere at the mountain end of it. If you will hold my
hand, I believe I can make out to walk in it; blindfolded, if I have
to--and without thinking too much of the yesterdays."
"Ah, the yesterdays!" she said tenderly. "They are precious, too; for
out of them, out of their hindrances no less than their helpings, comes
to-day. Kiss me, twice, Tom; and then I must go in and read to Major
Grandpa."
THE END