He drew out his watch, a mechanical action which relieved the emotional tension that stretched like a drawn cord between them. "It is not yet six. Will you walk a little way with me down this street? There is still time."
As she nodded silently, they turned and went back along the side street, under the irregular rows of lindens, in the direction from which he had come.
"One of the girls I used to teach sent for me when she was dying," she said presently, as if feeling the need of some explanation of her presence in Botetourt. "That was three days ago and the funeral was yesterday. It is a great loss to me, for I haven't so many friends that I can spare the few I love."
He made no answer to her remark, and in the silence that followed, he felt, with a strange ache at his heart, that the distance that separated them was greater than it had been when she was in Tappahannock and he in Botetourt. Then there had stretched only the luminous dream spaces between their souls; now they stood divided by miles and miles of an immovable reality. Was it possible that in making her a part of his intense inner life, he had lost, in a measure, his consciousness of her actual existence? Then while the vision still struggled blindly against the fact, she turned toward him with a smile which lifted her once more into the shining zone of spirits.
"If I can feel that you are happy, that you are at peace, I shall ask nothing more of God," she said.
"I am happy to-day," he answered, "but if you had come yesterday, I should have broken down in my weakness. Oh, I have been homesick for Tappahannock since I came away!"
"Yet Botetourt is far prettier to my eyes."
"To mine also—but it isn't beauty, it is usefulness that I need. For the last two years I have told myself night and day that I had no place and no purpose—that I was the stone that the builders rejected."
"And it is different now?"
"Different? Yes, I feel as if I had been shoved suddenly into a place where I fitted—as if I were meant, after all, to help hold things together. And the change came—how do you think?" he asked, smiling. "A man wanted money of me to keep him out of the poorhouse."