When Sanford reached his apartments Sam was waiting for him, as usual. The candles were lighted instead of the lamp. The windows of the balcony were wide open.
“You need not wait, Sam; I’ll close the blinds,” he said, as he stepped out and sank into a chair.
Long after Sam had gone he sat there without moving, his head bent, his forehead resting on his hand. He was trying to pick up the threads of his life again, to find the old pattern which had once guided him in his course, and to clear it from the tangle of lines that had suddenly twisted and confused him.
For a long time he saw nothing but Kate’s eyes as they had met his own, with the possibilities which he had read in their depths. He tried to drive the picture from him; then baffled by its persistence he resolutely faced it; held it as it were in his hands, and, looking long and unflinchingly at it, summoned all his courage.
He had read Kate’s heart in her face. He knew that he had revealed his own. But he meant that the future should be unaffected by the revelations made. The world must never share her confidence nor his, as it would surely do at their first false step. It should not have the right to turn and look, and to wonder at the woman whom he was proud to love. That open fearlessness which all who knew her gloried in should still be hers. He realized the value of it to her, and what its loss would entail should a spoken word of his rob her of it, or any momentary weakness of theirs deprive her of the strength and comfort which his open companionship could give.
No! God willing, he would stand firm, and so should she.
An hour later he was still there, his unlighted cigar between his lips, his head on his hands.
CHAPTER XVI—UNDER THE WILLOWS
The mile or more of shore skirting the curve of Keyport harbor from Keyport Village to Captain Joe’s cottage was lighted by only four street lamps. Three of these were hung on widely scattered telegraph-poles; the fourth was nailed fast to one end of old Captain Potts’s fish-house.