"You surely didn't wish that they would, Karl?"
"No." He paused for a moment at the door. "No--only everything appeared to be so futile. My bad deeds never turned on me as my good ones have done. It makes everything seem incoherent. What--what would a woman like Miss Barrington make of all that--of harm coming from good?"
"I don't know," said Honora, rather sharply. "She hasn't written. I told her all the trouble we were in,--the danger and the distress,--but she hasn't written a word."
"Why should she?" demanded Wander. "It's none of her concern. I suppose she thinks a fool is best left with his folly. Good-night, cousin. You're a good woman if ever there was one. What should I have done without you?"
Honora smiled wanly. He seemed to have forgotten that it was she who would have fared poorly without him.
She closed up the house for the night, looking out in the bright moonlight to see that all was quiet. For many days and nights she had been continually on the outlook for lurking figures, but now she was inclined to believe that she had overestimated the animosity of the strikers. After all, try as they might, they could bring no accusations against the man who, hurt to the soul by their misunderstanding of him, was now laying his tired head upon his pillow.
All was very still. The moonlight touched to silver the snow upon the mountains; the sound of the leaping river was like a distant flute; the wind was rising with long, wavelike sounds. Honora lingered in the doorway, looking and listening. Her heart was big with pity--pity for that disheartened man whose buoyancy and self-love had been so deeply wounded, pity for those wandering, angry, aimless men and women who might have rested secure in his guardianship; pity for all the hot, misguided hearts of men and women. Pity, too, for the man with the most impetuous heart of them all, who wandered in some foreign land with a woman whose beauty had been his lure and his undoing. Yes, she had been given grace in those days, when she seemed to stand face to face with death, to pity even David and Mary!
She walked with a slow firm step up to her room, holding her head high. She had learned trust as well as compassion. She trusted Karl and the issue of his sorrow. She even trusted the issue of her own sorrow, which, a short time before, had seemed so shameful. She threw wide her great windows, and the wind and the moonlight filled her chamber.
Two days later Karl Wander and Honora Fulham rode together to the village, now dismantled and desolate.