First he had striven to plunder them, then sought to lift the yoke of poverty from their long-bowed shoulders. In both efforts he had failed.

But had he failed, after all? Certainly he stood under the black shadow of a major disaster, but had not others retrieved disasters and made final victory only the brighter for its contrast with lurid misfortune?

He had been the plunger who seemed strongest when he was weakest, and these enduring hills spoke their message of steadfastness to him as he stood surrounded by their lofty crests of spruce and pine.

Then he had reached the door and flung it open and Glory was in his arms, but unaccountably she had burst into a tempest of tears.

Before he had had time to speak of the necessity that called him East she was telling of the visit of Martin Harrison and his indignant departure.

Despite his all-consuming absorption of a moment before, Spurrier drew away, chilled by that announcement, and Glory read in his eyes a momentary agony of apprehension.

"In G.o.d's name," he demanded in a numbed voice, "why didn't you write me about that?"

"He said," responded the wife simply, "that _he_ would write to you at Frankfort. I thought you knew."

"But I should have thought you'd have spoken of his coming and going--like that."

Her head came up with a brief little flash of hurt pride.

"You hadn't ever told him--about me," she said, though without accusation. "I didn't want to talk to you about it until you were ready to suggest it. It might have seemed--disloyal."

Spurrier again braced his shoulders. After a moment he took her in his arms.

"Glory, my sweetheart, I've been playing a game for big stakes. I've had to do some things I didn't relish. I've got to do another now. I'm summoned to Harrison's office in New York, at once--and I have no choice."

Glory drew away and looked with challenging directness into his eyes.

"I suppose--you'll go alone?"

"I must. Business affairs are at a crisis, and I need a free hand.

But, G.o.d granting me a safe return, it's to be our last separation. I swear that. I am always wretched without you."

Always before when disappointment or disquiet had riffled the deeps of her eyes, it had taken only a word and a smile from this man to dispel them and bring back the serenity of content. Her moments of panic when she had seemed to drop down, down into pits of foreboding until she had plumbed the depth of despair, had been moments to which she had surrendered in his absence and of which he had been given no hint.

Now with a gravity that was bafflingly unreadable she stood silent and looked about the room, and the man's eyes followed hers.

Why was it, he almost fiercely demanded of himself, that this cottage set in remote hills shed about him a feeling of soul-satisfaction that he had never encountered in more luxurious places?

Now as he looked at it the thought of leaving it cramped his heart with a sort of breathless agony.

Yet, of course, there was no question after all. It was because in everything it was reflection of Glory's own spirit and to him Glory stood for the only love that had ever been bigger to him than himself.

The simplicity and good taste of the small house, standing in a land of squalid cabins like a disciple of quiet elegance among beggars, had been the result of their collaboration. Glory had had the instinct of artistic perception and true values and he had been able to guide her from his sybarite experience.

The stone fireplace with its ingle-nook, built by their own hands from rocks they had selected and gathered together, seemed to him a beautiful thing. The natural wood of the paneling, picked out at the saw-mill with a critical eye for graining and figuration, satisfied the eye, and the few pictures that he had brought from the East were all landscapes that meant something to each of them--lyric bits of canvas with singing skies. To every object a memory had attached itself; a memory that had also a tendril in their hearts.

But now Glory, too, was looking at all these things as though she as well as himself were leaving them. There was something of farewell in the glance that lingered on them and caressed them, as if of leave-taking and into Spurrier's heart crept the intuition that despite his declaration just made that this should be their last separation, she was seeing in it a threat of permanence.

And that was the thought that was chilling Glory's heart and muting the song of happiness which his coming had awakened. This place which had been founded with all the promise of home and companionship was beginning to hold for her the foreboding of loneliness and something like abandonment. He knew it only when they were together here, but she had been in it alone and frightened more than in times of shared happiness.

And why was this true? Why could it be either true or necessary unless, as she had told herself in panic moments and denied so persistently, she was a misfit in his broader life and a woman whom he could enjoy in solitude but dared not trust to comparison with others?

CHAPTER XIX

At last she turned abruptly away, in order that the misery which would no longer submit to concealment might not show itself in her eyes, and stood looking out of the window.

Spurrier crossed with anxious swiftness and took her again into his arms.

"When I have finished this business trip," he declared fervently, "our separations shall end. They have been too many and too long--but I've paid for them in loneliness, dear. This call, that I'm answering now, is unexpected but it's imperative and I can't disobey it."

She turned then, slowly and gravely, but with no lightening of the burdened anxiety in her eyes.

"It's not just that you have to go away, Jack," she told him. "It's a great deal more than that."

"What else is there, dearest?" His question was intoned with surprise.

"When we are together, I have nothing else to ask of life. Have you?"

"The place has been changed--mightily changed," she went on musingly as though talking to herself rather than to him. "And yet the walls are the same as they were that day--when we both thought we had to die here together."

"They are the dearer for that," he exclaimed fervently. "That was what made us see things truly."

"I wonder," she questioned, then meeting his eyes steadily she went on as though determined to say what must be said.

"When you called Brother Hawkins in to marry us, I was afraid. I was afraid because I thought you were only doing it out of kindness, and that afterward you'd be ashamed of me."

"Ashamed of you," he echoed with indignant incredulity. "In G.o.d's name how could I be?"

"Or if not ashamed of me that you couldn't help knowing that I was--what I am--all right here in the hills but that outside--I wouldn't do."

"If you were ever afraid of that, it was only because you were undervaluing yourself. You surely haven't any ghost of such a fear left now."

For a little she stood silent again torn between the loyalty that hesitated to question him and the pride that was hurt.

Finally she said simply: "It's a bigger fear now. Unless I'm unpresentable, why do you--never take me anywhere with you?"

John Spurrier laughed, vastly relieved that the mountain of her anxiety had resolved itself, as he thought, into a mole-hill. He could laugh because he had no suspicion of the chronic soreness of her heart and his answer was lightly made.

"These trips have all been in connection with the sort of business, Glory, that would have meant keeping me away from you whether you had gone to town or not. When we travel together--and I want that we shall travel a great deal--I must be free to devote myself to you. I want to show the world to you and I want to show you to the world."

That declaration he fancied ought to resolve her fears of his being ashamed of her.

"If you were afraid I'd seem out of place," she a.s.sured him, "I might be right sorry--and yet I think I'd understand. I'm not a fool and I know I'd make mistakes, but I was raised a lawyer's daughter and I've got a pretty good business head--yet you've never told me anything of what this business is that calls you away. You always treat me as if there were no use in even trying to make me understand it."

The man no longer laughed. He could not explain that it was rather because she might understand too well than not well enough. Even to her, until he was ready to prove his intent by his actual deeds, it seemed impossible to give that story without the seeming of the plunderer of her people.