"It is not that," she said firmly, with an intuitive conviction that leaped past the very natural view the Judge had taken. "It was not the fear of having a blind child to take care of that led him to this step. It was something else."
"What?" demanded the Judge. "Will you tell me what?"
"No," she said, "I cannot tell you what. But this much I am sure of—it was not that."
Judge Kirtley took off his glasses, polished them carefully, and put them on again. Then he looked over them into the face of his client.
"Well, Margaret, the ways of a woman and the working of a woman's mind are truly past finding out. You defend Richard De Jarnette!"
"I don't defend him," she cried hotly, "except against injustice. Anybody is entitled to fair play,—especially the absent. You have always urged me to look at both sides."
"Yes," he remarked dryly, "but heretofore you have never been able to do it."
She could not have told why she did it now. She protested to herself that it was only in common justice that she had spoken. But the truth is that love is the great discerner. It had cleared her vision and quickened her understanding. Unacknowledged, feared and fought against as the feeling was in the desperate spirit which recognized this as a death struggle, it was yet forcing her to see with its eyes. Henceforth, her judgments of this man would be, whether she would or not, truer, juster, more righteous judgments; her comprehension of motive where he was concerned, more subtly discriminating. It is the law of love.
It was the afternoon of the third day before he came. Three nights with their deadening, suffocating pall of darkness had fallen upon her,—darkness and the whip-poor-wills that drove her wild. She had made up her mind that he was gone as Victor had. Then as suddenly as he had departed he appeared before her one afternoon out in the grape arbor, whither in her restlessness she had gone. She and Philip both loved the place and often walked there when she came to see him, running races sometimes up and down its dim aisles through which the sun flickered intermittently now that the wistaria was out. Richard De Jarnette coming home unexpectedly one day just before Philip was taken sick heard shrieks of childish laughter there and forgetting that it was Margaret's day at Elmhurst, went down to find out what made his nephew so uproariously gay. What he saw was the woman who to him had always been cold and stately chasing the child, shrieking with delight, up and down and in and around the arbor, catching him at last and smothering him with kisses—taking toll—while Philip releasing himself and poising in ecstatic anticipation, cried coaxingly, "Do it again!"