"Oh," cried Evelina, in a tone of dull disappointment.

"I called you," said the Piper, gently, "and you came."

She turned on her heel and walked swiftly away. She went downhill with more haste than dignity, turned to her right, and struck out through the woods for the main road.

The Piper watched her until she was lost among the trees. The birds came back for their crumbs and grain and he stood patiently until his feathered pensioners had finished and flown away, chirping with satisfaction. Then he stooped to pat the yellow mongrel.

"Laddie," he said, "I'm thinking there's no more gypsying for us just now. To-morrow, we will not pack our shop upon our back and march on, as we had thought to do. Some one needs us here, eh, Laddie?"

The dog capered about his master's feet as if he understood and fully agreed. He was a pitiful sort, even for a mongrel. One of his legs had been broken and unskilfully set, so he did not run quite like other dogs.

"'T isn't a very good leg, Laddie," the Piper observed, "but I'm thinking 't is better than none. Anyway, I did my best with it, and now we'll push on a bit. It's our turn to follow, and we 're fain, Laddie, you and I, to see where she lives."

Bidding the dog stay at heel, the Piper followed Miss Evelina's track.

By dint of rapid walking, he reached the main road shortly after she did. Keeping a respectful distance, and walking at the side of the road, he watched her as she went home. From the safe shelter of a clump of alders just below Miss Mehitable's he saw the veiled figure enter the broken gate.

"'T is the old house, Laddie," he said to the dog; "the very one we were thinking of taking ourselves. Come on, now; we'll be going.

Down, sir! Home!"

VII

"The Honour of the Spoken Word"

Anthony Dexter sat in his library, alone, as usual. Under the lamp, Ralph's letters were spread out before him, but he was not reading.

Indeed, he knew every line of them by heart, but he could not keep his mind upon the letters.

Between his eyes and the written pages there came persistently a veiled figure, clothed shabbily in sombre black. Continually he fancied the horror the veil concealed; continually, out of the past, his cowardice and his shirking arose to confront him.

A photograph of his wife, who had died soon after Ralph was born, had been taken from the drawer. "A pretty, sweet woman," he mused. "A good wife and a good mother." He told himself again that he had loved her--that he loved her still.

Yet behind his thought was sure knowledge. The woman who had entered the secret fastnesses of his soul, and before whom he had trembled, was the one whom he had seen in the dead garden, frail as a ghost, and again on the road that morning.

Dimly, and now for the first time, there came to his perception that recognition of his mate which each man carries in his secret heart when he has found his mate at all. Past the anguish that lay between them like a two-edged sword, and through the mists of the estranging years, Evelina had come back to claim her own.

He saw that they were bound together, scarred in body or scarred in soul; crippled, mutilated, or maimed though either or both might be, the one significant fact was not altered.

He knew now that his wife and the mother of his child had stood outside, as all women but the one must ever stand. Nor did he guess that she had known it from the first and that heart-hunger had hastened her death.

Aside from a very deep-seated grat.i.tude to her for his son, Anthony Dexter cherished no emotion for the sake of his dead wife. She had come and gone across his existence as a b.u.t.terfly crosses a field, touching lightly here and there, but lingering not at all. Except for Ralph, it was as though she had never been, so little did she now exist for him.

Yet Evelina was vital, alive, and out of the horror she had come back.

To him? He did not believe that she had come definitely to seek him--he knew her pride too well for that. His mind strove to grasp the reason of her coming, but it eluded him; evaded him at every point.

She had not forgotten; if she had, she would not have given back that sinuous necklace of discoloured pearls.

By the way, what had he done with the necklace? He remembered now. He had thrown it far into the shrubbery, for the pearls were dead and the love was dead.

"First from the depths of the sea and then from the depths of my love."

The mocking words, written in faded ink on the yellowed slip of paper, danced impishly across the pages of Ralph's letters. He had a curious fancy that if his love had been deep enough the pearls would not have turned black.

Impatiently, he rose from the table and paced back and forth restlessly across the library. "I'm a fool," he growled; "a doddering old fool.

No, that's not it--I've worked too hard."

Valiantly he strove to dispel the phantoms that cl.u.s.tered about him. A light step behind him chimed in with his as he walked and he feared to look around, not knowing it was but the echo of his own.

He went to a desk in the corner of the room and opened a secret drawer that had not been opened for a long time. He took out a photograph, wrapped in yellowed tissue paper, and went back to the table. He unwrapped it, his blunt white fingers trembling ever so slightly, and sat down.

A face of surpa.s.sing loveliness looked back at him. It was Evelina, at the noon of her girlish beauty, her face alight with love. Anthony Dexter looked long at the perfect features, the warm, sweet, tempting mouth, the great, trusting eyes, and the brown hair that waved so softly back from her face; the all-pervading and abiding womanliness.

There was strength as well as beauty; tenderness, courage, charm.

"Mate for a man," said Dexter, aloud. For such women as Evelina, the knights of old did battle, and men of other centuries fought with their own temptations and weaknesses. It was such as she who led men to the heights, and pointed them to heights yet farther on.

Insensibly, he compared Ralph's mother with Evelina. The two women stood as far apart as a little, meaningless song stands from a great symphony. One would fire a man with high ambition, exalt him with n.o.ble striving--ah, but had she? Was it Evelina's fault that Anthony Dexter was a coward and a shirk? Cravenly, he began to blame the woman, to lay the burden of his own shortcomings at Evelina's door.

Yet still the face stirred him. There was life in those walled fastnesses of his nature which long ago he had denied. Self-knowledge at last confronted him, and would not be put away.

"And so, Evelina," he said aloud, "you have come back. And what do you want? What can I do for you?"

The bell rang sharply, as if answering his question. He started from his chair, having heard no approaching footsteps. He covered the photograph of Evelina with Ralph's letters, but the sweet face of the boy's mother still looked out at him from its gilt frame.

The old housekeeper went to the door with the utmost leisure. It seemed to him an eternity before the door was opened. He stood there, waiting, summoning his faculties of calmness and his powers of control, to meet Evelina--to have out, at last, all the shame of the years.

But it was not Evelina. The Reverend Austin Thorpe was wiping his feet carefully upon the door-mat, and asking in deep, vibrant tones: "Is the Doctor in?"

Anthony Dexter could have cried out from relief. When the white-haired old man came in, floundering helplessly among the furniture, as a near-sighted person does, he greeted him with a cordiality that warmed his heart.

"I am glad," said the minister, "to find you in. Sometimes I am not so fortunate. I came late, for that reason."

"I've been busy," returned the Doctor. "Sit down."

The minister sank into an easy chair and leaned toward the light. "I wish I could have a lamp like this in my room," he remarked. "It gives a good light."

"You can have this one," returned Dexter, with an hysterical laugh,

"I was not begging," said Mr. Thorpe, with dignity. "Miss Mehitable's lamps are all small. Some of them give no more light than a candle."

"'How far that little candle throws its beams,'" quoted Dexter. "'So shines a good deed in a naughty world.'"

There was a long interval of silence. Sometimes Thorpe and Doctor Dexter would sit for an entire evening with less than a dozen words spoken on either side, yet feeling the comfort of human companionship.

"I was thinking," said, Thorpe, finally, "of the supreme isolation of the human soul. You and I sit here, talking or not, as the mood strikes us, and yet, what does speech matter? You know no more of me than I choose to give you, nor I of you."

"No," responded Dexter, "that is quite true." He did not realise what Thorpe had just said, but he felt that it was safe to agree.

"One grows morbid in thinking of it," pursued Thorpe, screening his blue eyes from the light with his hand. "We are like a vast plain of mountain peaks. Some of us have our heads in the clouds always, up among the eternal snows. Thunders boom about us, lightning rives us, storm and sleet beat upon us. There is a rumbling on some distant peak and we know that it rains there, too. That is all we ever know. We are not quite sure when our neighbours are happy or when they are troubled; when there is sun and when there is storm. The secret forces in the interior of the mountain work on unceasingly. The distance hides it all. We never get near enough to another peak to see the scars upon its surface, to know of the dead timber and the dried streams, the marks of avalanches and glacial drift, the precipices and pitfalls, the barren wastes. In blue, shimmering distance, the peaks are veiled and all seem fair but our own."

At the word "veiled," Dexter shuddered. "Very pretty," he said, with a forced laugh which sounded flat. "Why don't you put it into a sermon?"