“It’s done,” he said, with a smile which lighted his eyes into altars upon which burned holy fires of love and joy, “and never can be undone. And when you’re home again—oh, please promise me—we’ll have—the rest of it—without any delay at all?”
“I promise.” The smile she gave him back, he thought, was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.
At the door of the little house under the shadow of the great Abbey, Miss Stoughton met them with a message, sent in haste from Dr. John Leaver, forwarding Black’s orders to sail that night.
“But if,” he said, standing with Jane at the last moment, alone with her in the small drawing room, “by any strange happening this should be all that we ever had of each other in this life, we have had—it all! Jane, we have had it all—all the best of it!”
“Yes!” she breathed it. “But”—she lifted her face and whispered it—“I want—a life-time to say that in!”
“So do I—bless you!—and we shall have it—somehow I’m very sure. God keep you safe, my Best Beloved, I know He will!”
Then he went away, limping a very little with his cane, but walking very erect and looking as if he had won all the wars of all the worlds. He could hardly have been so happy if he had.
CHAPTER XXIII
THE TOWN WAS EMPTY BEFORE
“OF course I’m going down to New York to see him in!” shouted Dr. Redfield Pepper Burns. He waved a cable message in his good right hand. “What did I wire Leaver to wire me the date for, if not so I could be on the pier yelling when that darn chaplain of the ——nth gets in? Why, if Cary Ray’s word is to be trusted, Black’s come through hell, same as the rest of ’em. Be there? You bet I’ll be there.”
He was there. Nothing could have stopped him. He wanted to see instantly for himself that those shoulder and thigh injuries of which Leaver had written were not going to leave any serious or permanent results. Besides—oh, yes, he wanted to see the man himself, his friend,—who had faced death for him, as every soldier who went had faced it, for those who were left behind. He wanted to see Robert McPherson Black, and look into those keen, dark eyes of his, and see break over the well-remembered clean-cut face that smile which Red knew the first wave of his arm would bring.