At a little town along the road another kindly railway conductor lifted him far along his northern journey, so that presently he was coming to the lower edge of what might have been called the North; for now he approached the great Ohio River and its scattered string of thriving communities. He had eaten only when he found the means to pay for what he ate. Twice he found it necessary to stop in a little town and work for a period of a day or so. Rarely did he sleep in a room. He was still a man of the wilderness.
And he was happy, was David Joslin. For the first time, it seemed to him, the clouds were lifting from his soul. Now, it seemed to him, he had done something to offset his own sin.
Driving his worn body mercilessly, he was footsore and weary when at length he arrived in one of the little towns on the banks of the Ohio River, a junction point where all the north and south railway was crossed by one of the greater systems running east and west, a place of some five or six thousand inhabitants—one of those many communities which have their own pretensions at metropolitanism, each like to a thousand others.
Certain features of these centers of civilization still continued to interest Joslin, a man of such extraordinary lack of opportunity. He stood to-day, therefore, boylike, reading the lettering on the Strattonville billboards which announced certain attractions in the theaters and cinema houses for that evening. And he saw something which caused him to flinch as though smitten.
He could not turn away from the great letters which he saw, two feet or more, widely displayed.
POLLY PENDLETON! POLLY PENDLETON!
HER OWN COMPANY
DIRECT FROM HER GREAT BROADWAY SUCCESS
Polly Pendleton! Polly Pendleton! David Joslin knew not how many times the name stood there in print. That a team of vaudeville artists had grown into a certain vogue in the city; that this vogue had become, for one of the performers, a sort of reputation; that a concert singer had grown into being something of an actress, and the actress into some sort of a star heading a company of her own; that this star and her company—whether for reasons of success or lack of success—had left the city to tour “the provinces”—David Joslin knew none of these things. All he knew, or cared to know, or could understand, was that without doubt she was here! She, the corpus delicti of his sin!
As the criminal will return to the very place of his crime, so now David Joslin found his feet going where he did not list. There came into his soul a great recklessness. He forgot the occupation of his last two years, forgot the long road before him. Independence, prodigality, seized him as fully as it might any gilded youth. So, since prodigality also is a wholly relative thing, David Joslin bought him a ticket to the theater that night, repaired to a nearby restaurant, and ate what was to him the most expensive meal of all his life.
No longer the happy wayfarer, but an anxious, downcast and distraught man, on his soul a shadow, he found his way to his seat—his first time in any actual theater. The whirl of it all, the light, the warmth, the color, the music, at first were things rather of torture to him. Where was she?
But presently she came, bowing, smiling, light-footed—it was she, her very self! Yes, these were her eyes, dark and large as ever. Her little mouth, turned up a-corner, was as sweet as ever. Her dark hair curled as it did that other time. Her straight young figure was the same, with all its tender curves. Above all, her frank smile, her compelling air of comradery, were just the same as then, that time, two years ago.