The man's voice suddenly sank into a bottomless pit of thronging memories. He stirred, and took a step toward her, holding out his hand. She put hers quickly into it. The ardent, generous action seemed again to make him a man of inflexible control, for he held the hand only a moment, raised it to his lips, kissed it and then gently put it down.
"You have always trusted me? You have always known me?" he asked in a sort of wonder.
"I have always known what you were inside your soul better than you knew yourself," she returned vividly. And as the sensitive long face turned on her, "I knew that you were you."
"If there were time," he answered, "I could tell you what that letter has brought back,—names, events, associations, a college, but which college I don't know, and outside, some sorrowful things, some shadow that brought my Night. What that shadow is I don't know, and until I am sure it is no shadow on my own life I must not come to you, my dear. I mustn't come to you——"
She was silent.
Colter, an indescribable strength on his face, added, "But outside of that, your father thinks, naturally, that I am unworthy, but I am sure I am worthy of you, as worthy as any man may be! Oh, things keep coming back, coming back!"
From the man's voice one could see that these things that came back were a veritable tide of joy and anguish, but that in any case they were life and sanity.
Suddenly, with uncontrolled tenderness, he moved to her side. "Sard, child, you belong to me," he said gently. She could hear this man's breath, his heart plunging in his chest. She almost waited to be swept to him, to be lost in him, but that did not come. Under his voice and look lay judgment, a guidance that calmed all their passion.
Colter took both her hands; he looked into her quivering face. "I was hungry and ye took me in," he said brokenly, "a stranger and ye ministered unto me."
There was a long silence. The crickets clicked their little time devices; the stars were long ropes of flowers; the trees, in great shapes of withheld tenderness, shadowed and shut them in; and in the little gray fruit orchard a girl's spirit felt its wings brush against another spirit. A girl's courage and fineness leaned with a great gratitude against a firmness and fineness greater than its own.