She rose in another moment, and saying nothing further, walked back toward the house, in front of which they came upon Mrs. Hastings. Sally looked at Mrs. Hastings significantly.
“I’m going over to the Range after supper,” she said.
Mrs. Hastings drove away with Agatha. She said little to the girl during the journey, but an hour after they had reached the homestead she slipped quietly into Agatha’s room. She found her reclining in a big chair sobbing bitterly. She sat down close beside her, and laid a hand upon her shoulder.
“I don’t think Sally could have said anything to trouble you like this,” she said.
It was a moment or two before Agatha turned a wet, white face toward her, and saw gentle sympathy in her eyes. There was, she felt, no cause for reticence.
“No,” she said, “it was the contrast between us. She has Gregory.”
Mrs. Hastings showed sympathy and comprehension. “And you have lost Harry—but I think you have not lost him altogether. We do not know that he is dead—but even if it be so, it was all that was finest in him that he offered you. It is yours still.”
She sat silent a moment or two before she went on again.
“My dear, it is, perhaps, cold comfort, and I am not sure that I can make what I feel quite clear. Still, Harry was only human, and it is almost inevitable that, had it all turned out differently, he would have said and done things that would have offended you. Now he has left you a purged and stainless memory—one, I think, which must come very near to the reality. The man who went up there—for an idea, a fantastic point of honor—sloughed off every taint of the baseness that hampers most of us in doing it. It was a man changed and uplifted above all petty things by a high chivalrous purpose, who made that last grim journey.”
Agatha realized the truth of this. Already Wyllard’s memory had become etherealized, and she treasured it as a very fine and precious thing. Still, though he now wore immortal laurels, that would not content her when all her human nature cried out for his bodily presence. She wanted him, as she had grown to love him, in the warm, erring flesh, and the vague, splendid vision was cold and remote. There was a barrier greater than that of crashing ice and bitter water between them.