"No, I've been walking out in the country—all evening. I was up there—on the road to the Calvary Cemetery. I'm going to tell Don the truth tomorrow.
"But look at your house—your poor little home." He cast about him a gaze which took in the ruin that had been made of all her belongings. "Oh, my God, Aurora! It was my own fault. It was I who made that mob a possible thing. And you were a good woman. You've been a good woman all the time. I never knew before what a splendid thing a woman can be. Why—strong!... And you called me 'Will' just now. What made you do that?"
"I don't know," said Aurora Lane. "I suppose a woman never does quite forget the—the first man of—of her life."
"But how sweet it all was," he broke out, "in spite of it all, in spite of everything! Oh, Aurie, don't you remember when I'd come and tap there on the window—and you'd come and let me in? I don't deserve even that memory ... a woman like you—and a man like me. But I can't forget it. And you let me come in now—that's my one last joy left for all my life. Why, it's the one thing I can never think of again without a shudder. Yes, I've come without your asking—and you—you've let me in.
"Aurie," he went on, "that's what leaves me so helpless. I know what I deserve—but I don't want to be despised.... I want more than I deserve! I've always had more than I deserved. It's about all any man can say. It's life itself, I suppose. I don't know what it is. But, Aurie, Aurie, I do see a thousand things now I never saw before."
She still sat, white, dumb. Only, now, her head began to move, slowly, from side to side. He caught the evidence of negative, and a new resolution came to him at last.
"Let it all go!" he said at length—and now indeed he was on his knees at her side. "What I have lost is nothing. I'll never ask for office until I have lived here twenty years, openly, as you have. I must have loved you! I did—I do! I do! I wish I were fit to love you now. Because, in twenty years more.... The years pass, Aurie. Won't they pass? My sentence——"
His gray head was bent down low in her lap now, as her son's had been at this very place but a day before. Her hands—hands stained with needle work, rough on the finger ends, the taper gone there into a little square—were the same long shapely hands that had touched his hair at another time. The eyes that looked down at him now under long, soft, dark lashes were the same. But they were more brooding—tender, yes, but more sad, more wise. There was no passion in her gaze, in her touch. What was hatred or revenge to her?
His face was hid deep in his hands as he knelt. It lay there in that haven, the lap of woman, the place of forgiveness—and of hope, as some vague memory seemed to say to him. Indeed, all the wisdom and all the mercy and all the hope of a world or of a universe of worlds were in the low voice of Aurora Lane as she stroked back his hair—the gray hair of an old man, who knelt beside her. It was the ancient pitying instinct of woman that was in her touch. Hardly she knew she touched him, so impersonal was it all to her.
"Will, you poor boy, you poor boy! Oh, poor boy!" He heard her voice once more. Suddenly he raised his head, he sprang up, he stood before her.