And ere his wet, quivering lips had closed, and while still his eyes were upward, and his two arms imploring Heaven, the two forces that had, like live combatants, met midway of his soul for supremacy, did separate.
The white purity of Righteousness had come into his evil heart, and the blackness dropped away and out of his life! And all the old poisonous venom, festering soul sores and gnawing misery ebbed out of the boy's being and left it receptive to the influx of harmony and heart-peace that he saw in Belle-Ann and which he so ardently craved.
Panting like a spent man at the end of a long run, Lem now fell down on his knees in his copious gratitude.
On his knees, his head on his arm, in a divine lethargy, he rested. With prayerful, oft-said words he pondered vaguely upon this miracle. So engrossed in his felicitude and deep thanksgiving was he that he did not see the gruesome spectacle at his back.
Belle-Ann sat upon the witch-elm block and strained her eager eyes upward. Aloft there on Eagle Crown she could see Lem against the moon-laved night. Now she could discern his figure full—now his upper half. Again his head only would make a blot. Moving—always moving. She divined the terrible struggle going on in his breast, in his will to renounce the hurtful creed that heredity had written in his blood, and she realized that the conflict was all for her own sake. She measured the boy's love and honor with ample adoration. He would not come to her with a lie on his lips to disguise the heritage of murder coiled in his heart.
As Belle-Ann waited and watched tensely, a pulsing anxiety swept her heart, like recurring waves gale-driven. Suddenly she leaped with a bound from the witch-elm block, her eyes full of a startling picture. The moon on the descent had caught Eagle Crown rock in its mystic grip, holding it out like a mighty bauble adorning the breast of the mountain.
Lem's full figure, framed within the moon's disk, was etched in magical proportions, like the portrayal of a powerful night glass.
Enraptured, she looked and saw Lem on the brink of the cliff, seemingly so near that she instinctively stretched out a hand to attract him. As she looked she saw him stretch his two arms outward and upward, and she understood their pantomimic plea.
The next instant the sound of his voice, faintly audible, reached her ear. She heard his inarticulate utterance, as with a fervent cry he called out to God, from his dire distraught heart.
Belle-Ann's white bosom heaved and caught a sob of salient joy as she darted up the trail toward Eagle Crown. She would fly to his side now. Lem needed her now. He needed her, who was a part of his life, there to succor him in this the blackest bereft hour of his existence. She knew that God had heard his abandoned supplications. She knew that God was reaching down to him a staff of righteous strength. She would hurry to his side, with the re-enforcement of her own great love while God was there helping him.