CHAPTER XLVII

"... AND ALL THE TRUMPETS SOUNDED!"

They had told her at the farm, the old man and the old woman who had looked so curiously at her, that Mr. Page had gone on up the wood-road towards the upper pasture. He liked to go there sometimes, they said, to look at the sunset from a big rock that stood in the edge of the white birch woods. They added, in extenuation of this, that of course somebody had to go up there anyhow, once in a while, to salt the sheep.

Sylvia had pa.s.sed on, pa.s.sed the great, square, many-chimneyed house, pa.s.sed the old-fashioned garden, and struck into the wood-road beyond the bars. The sun was so low now, almost below the edge of the Notch, that the rays were level and long behind her. So she had walked, bathed in luminous gold at Versailles, on the day when Austin had first told her that he loved her, on the day she had told him the truth. From the first moment she had seen him how he had always brought out from her the truest and best, finer and truer than anything she had thought was in her, like a reflection from his own integrity. His eyes that day, what clear wells of loyalty and honor ... how her mother would have loved him! And that other day, when he said farewell and went away to his ordeal ... she closed her eyes for an instant, pierced with the recollection of his gaze on her! What was she, what poor thing transfigured to divinity, that such pa.s.sion, such tenderness had been hers ... even for a moment ... even if now ...

She looked timidly up the green tunnel of the arching trees, fearing to see him at any moment. And yet how she hastened her steps towards where he was! The moments were too long till she should find her heart's home!

After a time, there came a moment of such terrible throbbing of the heart, such trembling, that she could not go on. She sat down on a rock beside the road and pressed her shaking hands on her cheeks. No, it was too awful. She had been insane to think of putting everything, her whole life, to the test of a moment's shock. She would go back.

She would write him....

She looked up and saw her mother's gallant figure standing there before her. She smiled, and started on. Strange that she had thought her mother could be dead. Her first instinct had been right. Her mother, _her_ mother could not die.

The road turned sharply to the left. She came out from the white birches. She was in the edge of the pasture, sweet-fern at her feet, a group of sheep raising startled heads to gaze at her, the sun's rim red on the horizon below her. And up there, the sunlight on his face, above her, stood Austin.

The sight of him was like a great burst of music in her heart, like a great flood of light. Her doubts, her uncertainties, they were gone out, as utterly as night goes before the sun. Her ears rang to a sound like singing voices. For a moment she did not feel the ground under her feet....

Austin looked down and saw her. He stood like a man in a dream.

And then he knew. He knew. And Sylvia knew. He gave a great cry of welcome which was to ring in her ears for all her life, like a benediction. He ran down to meet her, and took her in his arms.

THE END