Banks had already started off, when turning back suddenly, he caught Ordway's hand and wrung it in a grip that hurt. Then without speaking again, he hurried breathlessly in the direction from which he had come.
A few steps beyond the cross-roads Ordway saw through the heavy foliage the light in the dining-room at Cedar Hill. Then as he entered the avenue, he lost sight of it again, until he had rounded the curve that swept up to the front porch. At his knock Emily opened the door, with a lamp held in her hand, and he saw her face, surrounded by dim waves of hair, shining pale and transparent in the glimmering circle of light. As he followed her into the dining-room, he realised that after the family had gone upstairs to bed, she had sat at her sewing under the lamp and waited for his knock. At the knowledge a sense of comfort, of homeliness came over him, and he felt all at once that his misery was not so great as he had believed it to be a moment ago.
"May I get you something?" she asked, placing the lamp upon the table and lowering the wick that the flame might not shine on his pallid and haggard face.
He shook his head; then as she turned from him toward the hearth, he followed her and stood looking down at the smouldering remains of a wood fire. Her work-basket and a pile of white ruffles which she had been hemming were on the table, but moved by a feeling of their utter triviality in the midst of a tragedy she vaguely understood, she swept them hurriedly into a chair, and came over to lay her hand upon his arm.
"What can I do? Oh, what can I do?" she asked. Taking her hand from his sleeve, he held it for an instant in his grasp, as if the pressure of her throbbing palm against his revived some living current under the outer deadness that enveloped him.
"I am going away from Tappahannock to-morrow, Emily," he said.
"To-morrow?" she repeated, and laid her free hand upon his shoulder with a soothing, motherly gesture—a gesture which changed their spiritual relations to those of a woman and a child.
"A man asked me three questions to-night," he went on quietly, yet in a voice which seemed to feel a pang in every word it uttered. "He asked me if my name was Daniel Smith, and I answered—no."
As he hesitated, she lifted her face and smiled at him, with a smile which he knew to be the one expression of love, of comprehension, that she could offer. It was a smile which a mother might have bent upon a child that was about to pass under the surgeon's knife, and it differed from tears only in that it offered courage and not weakness.
"He asked me if I had been in prison before I came to Tappahannock—and I answered—yes."