And she clasped his hands in hers, and drew him back to the fireside.
“‘Bring forth the best robe, and put it on him; and bring hither the fatted calf, and kill it; and let us eat and be merry. For this my love was dead, and is alive again; and was lost, and is found.’ My God, I thank Thee!”
And then, out of the white hair and the blind blue eyes, slowly came back to me the face of that handsome gentleman which had so near beguiled our Milisent to her undoing, and had wrought such ill in Derwentdale.
“Joyce!” he saith, in a greatly agitated voice. “I would never have come hither, had I reckoned thou shouldst wit me.”
“Thou wert out of thy reckoning, then,” she answereth. “I tell thee, as I told Dulcie years agone, that were I low laid in my grave, I should hear thy step upon the mould above me.”
“I came,” he saith, “but to hear thy voice once afore I die. Look upon thy face can I never more. But I thought to hear the voice of the only woman which ever loved me in very truth, and unto whom my wrong-doing is the heaviest sin in all my black calendar.”
“Pardoned sin should not be heavy,” saith she.
“Nay,” quoth Mr Norris, “but it is the heaviest of all.”
“Come in, Leonard,” saith Aunt Joyce, tenderly.
“Nay, my merciful Joyce, let me not trouble thee,” saith he, “for if thou canst not see it in my face, I know in mine heart that I am struck for death.”