“Good-by!” I cried, swerving back. “Good-by, little Zyp!”
They moved from me a few paces. Out in the road the wind caught the woman’s skirts and flung her dark hair abroad. Suddenly she turned and came back to me.
“Renny,” she said, in low, heartrending tones, “it looks so happy and golden, but the fierce air talked in my lungs as I went. Oh, promise—promise—promise!”
“Anything, Zyp, in the wide world.”
“To care for my little one—my darling, if I’m called away.”
“Before God I swear to devote my life to her.”
She looked at me a long moment, with a piercing gaze, gave a hoarse, low sob, and catching at her child’s hand hurried away with her down the road. I watched their going till their shapes grew dim in the stormy dusk; then twisted about and strode my own way homeward.
Heaven help me! It was my last vision of her who, through all the hounding of fate, had made my life “a perfumed altar-flame.”
Before I reached the mill the rain swept down once more, wrapping the gabled city in high spectral gloom. Not dust to dust, it seemed, was our lot to be in common with the sons of men, but rather the fearfuller ruin of those whose names are “writ in water.”
So fiercely drove the onset of flying deluge that scarcely might I force headway against its icy battalions. Dark was falling when at last I reached the mill, and all conflicting emotions I might have felt on approaching it were numbed by reason of the mere physical effort of pressing forward. Therefore it was that hastening down the yard, my eyes were blind to neighboring impressions, otherwise some unaccustomed shape crouching in the shelter of its blackness would have induced me to a pause.