Oh the joy we share as we tarry there
None other has ever known—”
The words were the words of a hymn, he knew, one of those he had once criticised as being “emotional twaddle,” yet there was something exquisitely lovely and dear in the way she sang it, the perfect confidence of her soul in that One in whom she trusted expressed in those simple words. He glanced at her wistfully as he passed the door and took in all the slender grace of her pose, as the white fingers, holding the chalk, made rapid lines of figures on the board. The sun made a bright background of beaten gold, outlining the lovely head, and he glanced back wistfully. Here was a rare girl indeed. Why, in this age of progress, should it be that such a choice flower of womanhood should be tainted with a primitive fanaticism? It was as if she were a flower left over from the Victorian age, out of place in a world that had grown beyond her—exquisite, yet impractical. How could she possibly hope to get on in the world with such notions?
In the calm reflections of the night—of several nights—in which he had lain awake and gone over their last conversation, he had chided himself severely for going so far. He simply must not let himself go again, not until he was sure that he could make her over. Never would it do for him to hamper his future with one who was so utterly unadaptable to life as he found her up to date. It simply would ruin his career.
Yet that afternoon he made a special trip to town to find a certain book, one written in the vague modern shibboleth, sweet and mystical, with the emphasis on loving one another, and being able to see the good in everybody, and the next morning, with a perfect rose just coming out of bud, she found it lying on her desk. No name, just the rose and the book. Of course she knew who put them there, but if she had not, his smile and greeting as he passed her in the hall would have told her. And that day she prayed:
“Now, Father, help me. Keep me.”
When Tyke came back from Canada there was vengeance in his eye. It had not taken him long to find out that there was no such street and number as Lib had given him, but he did not turn about and flee home without first examining every inch of the city where there might be a possible clue to Darcy. He went to the General Delivery and asked for letters for Darcy Sherwood. He even stood for hours behind a pillar in the post-office and watched the comers and goers, hoping to find Darcy among them. He walked over the city in daytime and at night, examined its haunts and amusements, looked over the hotel registries, and searched in a number of places where it seemed likely to him he might find his former partner, but no trace did he find of Darcy.
The first meeting with his three friends after his return was not very satisfactory. They chided him for his absence, derided him for going to Canada at all at the instigation of a sharp child, and charged him with trying to serve his own ends by the delay. They even went so far as to suggest that perhaps he was in with Darcy himself and this was all a big bluff. Tyke drew off and fairly bellowed at them in his wrath, and finally settled down to a plan which he said would bring things to a climax within a week. The four heads were bent together long over a paper on which Cottar was jotting down suggestions for Tyke to act upon. It was Tyke, after all, who was made to play the part out in the open. And once, while they were talking in a little shanty far away from the town, with a bit of a candle in an old lantern for light, and their paper spread out on a rough box, there came a face at the window, a long, white, thin old face with only two teeth, one above and one below; a long heavy wisp of snow-white hair straggling over a high yellow forehead, and watery, faded eyes, yet keen, watching them. It ducked down when Tyke lifted his head once and looked nervously that way as a twig rubbed up and down on the roof in the wind from the old apple-tree outside, but the eyes peered up again and watched long and silently, listening; and crouched when the men put out the lantern and stole away into the night. It was only old Noah Casey, harmless and wandering about again, escaped from the poor farm, and travelling some of the old roads of his youth. Nobody minded old Noah, though he gave them a start now and then.
He was following a voice now, the voice he had heard loudest inside the shanty, the voice of the one with the red hair. Crouching low, he stole from tuft to tuft of the marshy grass, a thing of the night, old, flighty, his worn garment colorless like weathered wood, his wisps of hair blowing like gray clouds about his mild, anxious face from under the tattered felt hat. A bent old gnome in the dark, with something on his mind.