Anna was silent. This action of Gregory’s seemed very great to her, so wholly was it in opposition to his deep, instinctive antipathy toward Oliver. This man had seemed to embody in himself the evil forces which had entered Fraternia to destroy all of highest hope and purpose with which it had been established. And now Gregory had stooped to lift up, even to draw to himself, the man in all his hideous moral ugliness. Idealist as Anna had ever been, she saw in the nature thus revealed to her, in spite of failures and falls, a more robust virtue, a higher spiritual efficacy, than any of which she had known or dreamed. Again she found herself convicted of a too narrow and partial view of the working of the human spirit in her passionate withdrawal from Gregory in his time of temptation.
They had crossed the bridge now, and up the wooded slope Anna saw Barnabas and little Judith standing before the door of Gregory’s cabin. With simple and unaffected delight they welcomed her, and then suffered her to enter the house alone.
When the door had closed behind her, Barnabas came up quietly and took his place upon the rude steps which his hands had laid, and so sat, throughout the interview, as one self-stationed, to keep guard.
The interior of the cabin was as it had always been, with its rude furniture and its one picture, save that a broad and capacious couch covered with leather stood with its head just below the south window. On this couch, with a rug of grey foxskin thrown over his limbs, lay John Gregory, his head and shoulders propped high, his powerful hands lying by his sides with their own expression of enforced idleness.
He lifted his head as Anna entered, and leaned forward, raising his right hand in a pathetic salutation of reverence and gratitude.
Overcome by the new and more august repose of his face and by the pathos of his look and gesture, Anna crossed to where Gregory lay, and fell upon her knees by his side, her tears bathing his hand, although this she did not know.
For a space neither spoke nor moved. Then, as she rose from her knees, Anna said under her breath:—
“Life is greater than I thought.”
“Life is great,” returned Gregory, “because we live in God.” Then he asked humbly, all the fire of his earlier habit of speech quenched,—
“Do you then forgive me?”