The man got upon his feet rather unsteadily.
"That's the limit," he said definitively. "I'm a man now, Corona; too much of a man, I hope, to hide behind another man's grave. I'm going back to Brewster, to-day!"
The young woman made a quaint little grimace at him. "How are you going to get there?" she asked. "It's twenty miles, and the walking is awfully bad—in spots."
"But I must go. Can't you see what everybody will say of me?—that I was too cowardly to face the music when my time came? Nobody will believe that I wasn't a consenting party to this hide-away!"
"Sit down," she commanded calmly; and when he obeyed: "From day to day, since I began coming out here, John, I've been trying to rediscover the man whom I met just once, one evening over a year ago, at Cousin Adda's house in Guthrieville: I can't find him—he's gone."
"Corona!" he said. "Then you recognized me?"
"Not at first. But after a while little things began to come back; and what you told me—about Miss Richlander, you know, and the hint you gave me of your trouble—did the rest."
"Then you knew—or you thought—I was a criminal?"
She nodded, and her gaze was resting upon the near-by gravel heaps. "Cousin Adda wrote me. But that made no difference. I didn't know whether you had done the things they said you had, or not. What I did know was that you had broken your shackles in some way and were trying to get free. You were, weren't you?"
"I suppose so; in some blind fashion. But it is you who have set me free, Corona. It began that night in Guthrieville when I stole one of your gloves; it wasn't anything you said; it was what you so evidently believed and lived. And out here: I was simply a raw savage when you first saw me. I had tumbled headlong into the abyss of the new and the elemental, and if I am trying to scramble out now on the side of honor and clean manhood, it is chiefly because you have shown me the way."