Ruth wrote to her lover. Her father's keeping secret his receipt of
Godfrey's letter until he had mailed its answer, could mean only that
the answer was for Godfrey to come home. The General's talk of being
tired by the writing of it was a purely expletive irony, for he had
written with the brevity of an old soldier to a young sailor; but he had
written that trouble was impending, that its source was Arthur, and that
the last hope of removing it lay with him, Godfrey.
A line from Ruth, pursuing after this message, would be one steamer
behind it all the way, but it would reach the far wanderer before any
leave would permit him to start homeward.
So, now, what should she write? If her father had discerned so much more
than he had let any one know he had discerned, how about others? How
about the kind whose chief joy is ruthless guesswork? _That_ need
of haste was one she had overlooked. Wise father!
And yet--haste itself is such a hazardous thing! Ah, if Arthur had come
in on that evening express, what to write were an easier question. The
minutes sped by; her pen overhung the paper with the opening sentence
unfinished, and every moment the thought she kept putting away came
back: "Leonard!--Leonard!--Godfrey's summons should go to him from
Leonard; and it should flash under the seas, not crawl across
them!"--Hark!
She rose and glided to the door through which her brother had gone.
There she was startled by the sight of him speeding cautiously down
the stair.
* * * * *
On entering his unlighted room Leonard had moved across it to a front
window, where, veiled by the chamber's dusk, he stood looking out into a
night dimly illumined by the overclouded moon. The Winslow house widened
palely among its surrounding trees. The servants' rooms were remote as
well as on the farther side, and on the nearer side no lamplight shone.
A short way down the street a glow came from the Morris cottage.
Evidently Isabel was with her mother.
He stood and mused, unconsciously lulled by the cool drip of myriad
leaves, and with his mind poised midway between emotion and thought. To
yield to emotion would have been to chafe against the bands that knitted
his life and hers to every life about them. To yield to thought would
have been to think of her as no more to be drawn from these surrounding
ties than some animate rainbow-fringed flower of the sea can be torn
from its shell without laceration and death. To give thought word would
have been to cry, "Oh, truest of womankind, where would this unsuspected
man, this Leonard Byington, be if you were other than you are?" Yet the
suspense between avoided feeling and avoided thought held him where he
stood.
So standing, it drifted idly into his mind that yonder arbor must be
very wet to-night, and the cinder sidewalk out here much drier. As the
thought moved him to draw one step back, the glow from the cottage
broadened. Its front door had opened, and Mrs. Morris's young maid came
out with a lantern, followed by Isabel saying last fond words to her
mother as the convalescent closed the door.
"Good-night!" she called back.
In one great wave the young man's passion rolled over its bounds and
brought him to his knees with arms outstretched. "Oh, Isabel!" he
murmured. "Oh, my God! Oh, Isabel! Isabel! if I had but lost you
fairly!"
The two slight figures came daintily along the wet path in single file,
the maid throwing the lantern's beams hither and yon as she looked back
to answer Isabel's kindly questions; Isabel one moment half lost in the
gloom of the trees, and then so lighted up again from foot to brow that
it was easy to see the very lines of her winsome mouth, ripe for
compassion or fortitude, yet wishful as a little child's.
Her secret observer moaned as he stood erect. The fury of his soul
seemed to enhance his stature. He did not speak again, but, "Oh, Isabel!
harder to strive against than all the world beside!" was the unuttered
cry that wrote itself upon his tortured brow. "If your unfair winner
would only hold you by fair means! Yet I too was to blame! I too was to
blame, and you alone were blameless!"
Opposite his window Isabel ceased her light talk with the maid, halted,
bent, and scanned something just off the firm path, in the clean wet
sand.
The maid turned and flooded her with the light of the lantern just as
she impulsively lifted an alarmed glance to Leonard's window and as
quickly averted it. "Go on," said the mistress. "I can walk faster if
you can."
The girl quickened her steps, but had not taken a dozen when Isabel
stopped again. "Wait, Minnie. Now you can run back, thank you." She
reached for the lantern.
"I--I thought I was to go all the way, and--and bring the lantern back."
"No, I'll keep the lantern; but I'll stay here and throw the light after
you till you get in. Run along."
Minnie tripped away. As she came where they had first halted, a
purposely belated good-night softly overtook her; and when she looked
back, Isabel, as if by inadvertency, sent the lantern's beam into her
eyes. So too much light sent the maid by the spot unenlightened.
Leonard drew aside lest the beam swing next into his window. But the
precaution was wasted; the glare followed Minnie.
Isabel also followed, slowly, a few paces, and then moved obliquely into
the roadway and toward the window. Only for a moment the ray swept near
her unseen observer, and, lighting up the rain-packed sand close before
herself, revealed a line of footprints slanting toward her from
Leonard's own gate.
As the cottage door shut Minnie in, Isabel, reassured by the brightness
of the Byingtons' lower windows, stopped for a furtive instant, and
holding in her hand the fellow of the slipper so lately in Ruth's
fingers, exactly fitted it to one of these footprints. Then, with the
lantern on her farther side, and every vein surging with fright and
shame, she made haste toward the open gateway of the Winslow house.
A short space from it she recoiled with a gesture of dismay and
self-repression, and her light shone full upon a man. He stepped from
the garden, his form tensely lifted, his face aflame with anger.
But her small figure straightened also, and swiftly muffling the lantern
in a fold of her skirt, she exclaimed, audibly only to him, though in
words clear-cut as musical notes, "Oh, Arthur Winslow, has it come to
this?"
She arrested his resentful answer by the uplift of a hand, which left
the lantern again uncovered. "Inside! In the house!" she softly cried,
starting on. "Not here! Look!--those upper windows!--we're in full view
of them!"
Quickly she remuffled the lantern, but not in time to hide his motion as
he threw out an arm and pushed her rudely back, while he exclaimed, "In
full view of them answer me one question!"
It was then that Leonard went hurriedly downstairs.