"To that! Ah, no!"--his voice rang dominant, vibrant, triumphant now.

"Helena, don't you understand? We are to begin life again--in a new way, the true way, the only way. Don't you see--I love you!"

Still she did not move--but there was a great whiteness in her face, and in the whiteness a great light.

"You mean?"--her lips scarcely seemed to form the words.

"Yes!" he cried. "Yes; to make a home for you, to marry you if only you love me still, to live in G.o.d's own sight and hold you as a sacred gift--Helena! Helena!"--his arms went out to her again, and the yearning in his soul was in his voice--to crush her to him, to hold her in his arms, and hold her there where none should take her from him, to shield and guard her through the years to come, to live with her a life that seemed to break now in a vista of gladness, of glory, as the day-dawn breaks with its golden rays of G.o.d-given promise--the new life, perfect and pure and innocent--because he loved her. "Helena! Speak to me. Tell me that it is not too late--tell me that you love me too."

And then her eyes were raised to his, and they were wet--but there was love-light and a wondrous happiness shining through the tears.

"Helena!" he murmured brokenly--and swept her into his arms--and kissed the eyelids, lowered now, the hair, the white brow, the lips--kissed her, and held her there, her clinging arms about his neck, her face half hidden on his shoulder.

And so for a s.p.a.ce they stood there--and there were no words to say, only the song in their hearts in deathless melody--but after a little time he held her from him, and lifted up her face that he might look his fill upon it.

"Helena," he said, "I cannot understand it all yet--it is as though it were born out of the sin and the darkness and the blackness of what is gone--as though here at this Shrine that we created in mockery and crime it was meant that you and I should save each other for each other. And yet this Shrine as we have made it is a thing of guilt, and it has brought us all, you and I, and Harry, and the Flopper to a new life."

She lay still for a moment in his arms--then her hand crept up and touched his forehead and smoothed back his hair.

"I do not quite know how to say it," she said a little timidly. "When you went away this afternoon, the Patriarch took me back into his room, and--and I knelt at his knees--and after a little while my mind seemed very calm and quiet--do you know what I mean? And I tried to think things out--and understand. And it seemed to come to me that there was a shrine everywhere if we would only look for it--that G.o.d has put a shrine in every heart, only we are so blind--that every one can make their own surroundings beautiful and good and true, no matter where they are, or how poor, or how rich--and if they live like that they must be good and true themselves."

"Yes," he said slowly; then, after a moment: "And faith too is very much like that."

"Only some need a sign," she said.

There was silence again, while her hand crept over his face and back to his forehead to smooth his hair once more--and then very gently she slipped out of his arms.

"What are we to do about--about everything here?" she asked soberly. "We are forgetting that in our own happiness. How are we going to return the money that we have taken?"

"I don't know yet," he answered. "I haven't thought much about it--but we'll manage somehow."

She shook her head.

"I've thought a great deal about it since yesterday--and I'm not so sure it is to be 'managed somehow'--and the more I've thought the more tangled and complicated it has become."

"Well, we'll untangle it to-morrow," said Madison, with a smile, "and--"

"No"--she touched his sleeve. "To-night. Let us do it now--to-night. I should be so happy then."

He smiled at her again, and drew her to him.

"But we ought to have Pale Face and the Flopper too, don't you think so?" he said.

"Of course," she said; "and so we will. The Flopper is here, and we can send him for Harry. It's early yet--not ten o'clock."

"All right," said Madison; "if you wish it. We'll go in then and get the Flopper."

And so they walked to the cottage door, and into the porch--but in the porch Madison held her for a moment, and lifted up her face again and looked into her eyes.

"My--wife," he whispered--and took her in his arms.

--XXIII--

THE WAY OUT

Strange scene indeed! Strange ant.i.thesis to that other night when these four were gathered in that crime-reeked, sordid room at the Roost--where Pale Face Harry, gaunt, emaciated, coughed, and, trembling, plunged a morphine needle in his arm; where the Flopper, a wretched tatterdemalion from the gutter, licked greedy lips and gloated in his rascality; where Helena, flushed-faced, inhaled her interminable cigarettes and dangled her legs from the table edge; where Madison, suave, flippant, so certain of his own infallibility, glorying in his crooked masterpiece, laid the tribute to genius at his own feet!

Strange scene! Strange ant.i.thesis indeed! It was quiet here--very still--only the distant, m.u.f.fled boom of the pounding surf. And the shrine-room, for the first time since its creation, was locked against the night. It lay now in shadow from the single lamp upon the table--and the light, where it fell in a shortened circle, for the lamp itself had a little green paper shade, was soft, subdued and mellow.

Where he had been wont to sit in the days gone by, the Patriarch sat now in his armchair by the empty fireplace--in the shadow--his head turned in his strange, listening, attentive way toward the table--toward the four who were grouped around it. There had been no one to stay with him in his own room, and so Helena had brought him there--to play his silent part.

At the table, Pale Face Harry, bronzed and rugged, clear-eyed, a robust figure from his clean living, his months of the out-of-doors, traced the grain of the wood on the table mechanically with his finger nail, his face sober, perplexed; while the Flopper, clear-eyed too, his face almost a handsome one in its bright alertness, now that it had rounded out and the hard, premature lines were gone, mirrored Pale Face Harry's perturbed expression, his eyes fixed anxiously on Madison opposite him; and Helena, sitting beside Madison, was very quiet, her forehead wrinkled and pursed up into little furrows, the brown eyes with a hint of dismay and consternation lurking in their depths, one hand stretched out to lay quite unconsciously on Madison's sleeve--and from the sleeve to steal occasionally into Madison's hand.

Madison, his lips tight, pushed back his chair suddenly--they had been sitting there an hour.

"You were right, Helena," he said, with a nervous laugh. "The more you try to figure it out the worse it gets."

"Aw, say, Doc," pleaded the Flopper desperately, "don't youse give it up--youse have got de head--youse ain't never left us in a hole yet."

Madison looked at him, and smiled mirthlessly.

"My head!" he exclaimed bitterly. "I got you into this, all of you--but it will take more than my head to get you out. If I could stand for it myself, I'd do it--but I can't without dragging you in too--we're too intimately mixed up. If I said it was a deal of mine--they'd ask where Helena came from--they'd ask where you came from, Flopper. We're beaten--beaten every way we turn. The game has got us--we haven't a move. We played it to the limit, the slickest swindle that was ever worked, and it worked till there's more money than I've tried to count.

And then it changed us from thieves, from--from anything you like--and now that we want to quit, now that we want a chance to make good, it's got us in its grip and we can't get away." He flirted a bead of moisture from his forehead. "My G.o.d, I don't know what to do!" he muttered hoa.r.s.ely. "It was easy enough to _talk_ about stopping this thing, about returning the money--but I can't see the way out."

No one answered him--all were silent--as silent as the mute and venerable figure that sat, listening attentively it seemed, in the armchair by the fireplace.

Madison turned abruptly after a moment to Pale Face Harry.

"You, Harry," he said, laying a hand on the other's shoulder, "you're the only one of the four that can walk out of it--you don't show in the center of the stage--you go. You said the old folks would cry over you--twenty years is a long time to stay away from the old folks--I--I never knew mine. You go on back to the little farm out there in the West where you said you'd like to go, and--and give the old people a hand for the years they've got left."

Pale Face Harry shook his head.

"G.o.d knows I'd like to," he said, choking a little; "that's what I counted on. G.o.d knows I'd like to go out there and lead a decent life--but I don't go that way--I don't crawl out and leave you--what's coming to you is coming to me."

"That won't help us any, Harry," said Madison softly, and his hand tightened in an eloquent pressure on Pale Face Harry's shoulder. "You go--and G.o.d bless you!"

Again Pale Face Harry shook his head.

"No," he said. "I stick. If the game's got you, it's got me too--to the limit. There's no use talking about that."

The Flopper licked his lips miserably.

"Swipe me!" he mumbled. "h.e.l.l wasn't never like dis! Me an' Mamie we've got it fixed, an' her old man says he'll take me inter de store. Say, Doc, say--ain't dere a chanst ter live straight now we wants ter?"

But Madison did not hear the Flopper save in a vague, inconsequential way--he was looking at Helena. She had drooped forward a little over the table, her chin in her hands, her lips quivering--and a white misery in her face seemed to bring a chill, a numbness to his heart. His Hands clenched, and he began to pace up and down the room.