“He's been coming to see Mary steady for more than a year and they were to have been married three months ago but they quarreled and Mary told me last night that he was going away the last of this week. She is as good and sweet a girl as ever lived. She never kept company with anybody else and she thought the world of him. The damned villain has got around her with his honey words and now he proposes to leave her to face it alone. But I'll kill him as sure as the sun shines.”
“Sit down,” said the doctor, laying a hand on the excited man's arm and forcing him into a chair.
“Let me tell you what to do. Young Morely's father is a good and sensible man and will take the right view of it. Go straight to him and tell him all about it and my word for it, he will see that they are married right away. He is able to help them along and will make it to his son's advantage to stay here rather than go away. He will advise him right. Have no fear.” The old man wrung the doctor's hand in silence and went out.
Several days later the doctor was looking over the papers published in the town and read in the list of marriage licenses the names, “Benjamin Morely, aged twenty-four, Mary Stirling, aged eighteen.”
And that is why the scene in the farmhouse this summer night had sent him back into the past, for it was the home of Benjamin and Mary Morely, and it was a happy home. These two lives had come together and flowed on in such harmony and helpfulness and rectitude before the world that the stain had been wiped out. For a merciless world can be merciful sometimes if it will only stop to remember that long ago a compassionate Voice said, Go and sin no more.
The doctor's reverie came to an end for he had reached his destination—a large white house standing very close to the road.
“Don't talk to me while you are hitching the horse,” Mary whispered, “then they won't know there is anyone with you. I don't want to go in—I want to see the moon come up.”
The doctor took his case and went inside. Mary sat in the buggy and listened. The neighing of a horse far down the road and the barking of a dog in the distance were the only sounds she heard. How still and cool it was after the heat of the day. A wandering breeze brought the sweet perfume of dewy clover fields. She looked across the intervening knoll to the east. The tree that crowned its summit stood outlined against the brightening sky. She was sitting very near the open kitchen window and now saw the family taking their places around the supper table. She felt a little uncomfortable and as if she were trespassing on their privacy. But they did not know of her proximity and she could only sit still in the friendly cover of the darkness. How good the ham smelled and the potatoes and the coffee.
A pretty home-scene!
The father at the head of the table, the mother opposite with four sturdy boys between them, two on each side. The father looked around the board. Stillness settled down upon them, and then he bowed his head. The mother, too, bowed her head. The boys looked down.