Helen went to her own room and shut the door. But she did not light the candles. She sat down at her open window, in the hot, night wind. She leaned her cheek against her bare arm, from which the loose sleeve fell away. The elms were in such rich leaf that she could see the Seminary buildings only in broken outline now. But there was wind enough to lift and toss the branches, and through one of the rifts in the green wall she noticed that a light was burning in the third-story northwest corner of Galilee Hall.
It was past midnight before she went to bed. As she closed her blinds, for the first time in her life, the Professor’s daughter did deliberately, and of self-acknowledged intention, stoop to take a look at the window of a student.
“His light is still burning,” she thought. “What can be the matter?”
Then she flushed red with a beautiful self-rebuke, and fled to her white pillow.
Night deepened into perfect silence on Cesarea Hill. The last light in Galilee Hall went out. The moon rode on till morning. In the deserted green the clear-cut paths shone wide and long, and the great white cross lay as if nailed to its place, all night, between the Seminary and the Professor’s house.
V.
“Goshamighty, stand off there! Who in —— are you?”
This candid remark was addressed by a fisherman in blue flannel shirtsleeves to a gentleman in afternoon dress. It was in the month of September, and the fleets were busy in and off the harbor of the fishing-town. The autumn trips were well under sail, and the docks and streets of Windover buzzed and reeled with crews just anchored or about to weigh. At the juncture of the principal business avenue of the town with its principal nautical street—from a date passing the memory of living citizens irreverently named Angel Alley—a fight was in brisk progress. This was so common an incident in that part of the town that the residents had paid little attention to it. But the stranger, being a stranger, had paused and asked for a policeman.