The swinging arc-light suspended above the street-crossing sputtered and died down to a dull red dot of incandescence as Griswold returned Margery's note to his pocket and walked on.
There are crises in which the chief contention looms so large as to leave no room for the ordinary mental processes. Griswold saw no significance in the broken line of Margery's message. The one tremendous revelation—the knowledge that the dross-creating curse had finally fallen upon the woman whose convictions should have saved her—was blotting out all the subtler perceptive faculties; and for the time the struggle with the submerging wave of disappointment and disheartenment was bitter.
He was two squares beyond the crossing of the broken-circuited arc-light, and was still following the curve of the lakeside boulevard, when he came to the surface of the submerging wave long enough to realize that he had entered Jasper Grierson's portion of the water-front drive. The great house, dark as to its westward gables save for the lighted upper windows marking the sick-room and its antechamber, loomed in massive solidity among its sheltering oaks; and the moon, which had now topped the hills and the crimsoning smoke haze, was bathing land- and lake-scape in a flood of silver light, whitening the pale yellow sands of the beach and etching fantastic leaf-traceries on the gravel of the boulevarded driveway.
There was no enclosing fence on the Mereside border of the boulevard, and under the nearest of the lawn oaks there were rustic park seats, Jasper Grierson's single concession to the public when he had fought for and secured his property right-of-way through to the lake's margin. Griswold turned aside and sat down on one of the benches. The disappointment was growing less keen. He was beginning to understand that he had made no allowance for the eternal feminine in the idealized Fidelia—for the feminine and the straitly human. But the disheartenment remained. Should he stay and fight it out? Or should he take pity upon the poor prisoner of the conventions and seek to postpone the day of reckoning by flight?
He had not fitted the answer to either of these sharp-pointed queries when a pair of light-fingered hands came from behind to clap themselves upon his eyes, and a well-known voice said, "Guess."
"Margery!" he said; and she laughed with the joyous unconstraint of a happy child and came around to sit by him.
"I was doing time out on the veranda, and I saw you down here in the moonlight, looking as if you had lost something," she explained, adding: "Have you?"
"I don't know; can you lose that which you've never had?" he returned musingly. And then: "Yes; perhaps I did lose something. Don't ask me what it is. I hardly know, myself."
"You have just come from Doctor Bertie's?" she inquired.
"Yes."