The next day it was known that the preacher, Gabriel Brown, had left Laurel Spring on an urgent “Gospel call” elsewhere.
Colonel Starbottle returned that night with his friends to the county town. Strange to say, a majority of the audience had not grasped the full significance of the colonel's unseemly interruption, and those who had, as partisans, kept it quiet. Blair, tortured by doubt, had a new delicacy added to his hesitation, which left him helpless until the widow should take the initiative in explanation.
A sudden summons from his patient at the loggers' camp the next day brought him again to the fateful redwoods. But he was vexed and mystified to find, on arriving at the camp, that he had been made the victim of some stupid blunder, and that no message had been sent from there. He was returning abstractedly through the woods when he was amazed at seeing at a little distance before him the flutter of Mrs. MacGlowrie's well-known dark green riding habit and the figure of the lady herself. Her dog was not with her, neither was the revival preacher—or he might have thought the whole vision a trick of his memory. But she slackened her pace, and he was obliged to rein up abreast of her in some confusion.
“I hope I won't shock you again by riding alone through the woods with a man,” she said with a light laugh.
Nevertheless, she was quite pale as he answered, somewhat coldly, that he had no right to be shocked at anything she might choose to do.
“But you WERE shocked, for you rode away the last time without speaking,” she said; “and yet”—she looked up suddenly into his eyes with a smileless face—“that man you saw me with once had a better right to ride alone with me than any other man. He was”—
“Your lover?” said Blair with brutal brevity.
“My husband!” returned Mrs. MacGlowrie slowly.
“Then you are NOT a widow,” gasped Blair.
“No. I am only a divorced woman. That is why I have had to live a lie here. That man—that hypocrite—whose secret was only half exposed the other night, was my husband—divorced from me by the law, when, an escaped convict, he fled with another woman from the State three years ago.” Her face flushed and whitened again; she put up her hand blindly to her straying hair, and for an instant seemed to sway in the saddle.