Mr. Britton smiled. "I owe you an apology, but you know I am a poor correspondent at best, and of late business has called me here and there until I scarcely knew one day where I would be the next; consequently I have received my mail irregularly and have been irregular myself in writing."
Darrell's face grew tender, for he knew it was not business alone which drove his friend from place to place, but the old pain which found relief only in ceaseless activity and an equally unceasing beneficence. He well knew that many of his friend's journeys were purely of a philanthropic nature, and he remarked, with a peculiar smile,—
"Your travels always remind me very forcibly of the journey of the good Samaritan; when he met a case of suffering on the way he was not the one to 'pass by on the other side;' nor are you."
"Perhaps," said Mr. Britton, gravely, "he had found, as others have since, that pouring oil and wine into his neighbor's wounds was the surest method of assuaging the pain in some secret wound of his own."
Darrell watched his friend closely while he gave a brief account of his recent journeys along the western coast. Never before had he seen the lines of suffering so marked upon the face beside him as that night. Something evidently had reopened the old wound, causing it to throb anew.
"I need not ask what has brought you back into the mountains at this time of year and in this storm," Darrell remarked, as his friend concluded.
For answer Mr. Britton drew from his pocket an
envelope which Darrell at once recognized as a counterpart of one which had come to him some weeks before, but which he had laid away unopened, knowing only too well its contents.
"I am particularly glad, for Miss Underwood's sake, that you are here," he said; "she feared you might not come, and it worried her."
"Which accounts for the importunate little note which accompanied the invitation," said Mr. Britton, with a half-smile; "but I would have made it a point to be present in any event; why did she doubt my coming?"