The lift of her head was eloquent; the doctor wished he could see her face, but the darkness was too thick for that.
“May Heaven bless you!” faltered on his tongue; but the words were too unusual to the ascetic’s cold lips for them to pass into speech, and the girl thought his manner more distant and unsympathetic than common.
“It is a secret I have told you,” she murmured, and being then within a few steps of her own gate, she slid from his grasp and vanished in the darkness.
He, with a sigh that seemed to rend the icy bonds which years of repression had bound about his breast, remained for a moment with his head bent, gazing on the ground at his feet. Then he drew himself up, and passed quickly back over the road he had come.
V.
NOCTURNAL WANDERINGS.
THE wanderer, of whose name even the landlord at the tavern seemed uncertain, passed some curious days after this. Upon the plea of wanting work, he visited house after house in the village, staying in each one as long as he was made welcome. Though no talker, he seemed to like to have talk going on around him, and if he sometimes went to sleep over it, he was forgiven by the simple and credulous inhabitants on account of his old age and seeming decrepitude. In one house he was given breakfast, in another dinner, but in none did he find work, though he assured everybody that he was very good in the field, notwithstanding the unfortunate curvature of his back.
It was not an uncommon thing in Hamilton for men to pass from house to house in this way, and he was little noted, but if anyone had been curious enough to watch his eye they would have observed that it had a remarkably penetrating power, and that but little escaped its notice. Another thing that would also have been noticed was the curious look of recognition which would suddenly creep into his eyes, as if he saw some of these things for the second time; and if anyone had walked near enough to him to listen as well as watch, he would have heard a name drop from his lips now and then as he walked up the phlox-bordered walk of some humble garden, or stopped at the back door of one of the more pretentious mansions on the main street.
Another thing: When he had done this, when he had uttered in his odd, musing way, at the threshold of a house, the name of Fisher, Hutton, Brown, Unwin, or what not, he invariably managed in some way, either slyly or by bold question, to ascertain if this name really belonged to the family then residing there. If it did, he nodded his head complacently. If it did not, he frowned as if disappointed in his memory or whatever it was that had played him false.
At one place he showed conclusively that he had been in the house before, though no one seemed keen enough to detect the fact. He was passing down a hall, when he turned to the right and came plumb up against a wall. This was where there had formerly been a door of egress, but a change which had been made some ten years back in the inner arrangement of the house had placed it farther on, and his face showed surprise when he noted it, though the expression was speedily suppressed. Again at the Fishers’ he was very careful to sit in the deep shadow, and though he eagerly drank in all that was said, he himself made no remark after his first appeal for work. The Fishers were old neighbors of the Earles, and it was with them that Polly was living.