A tear rolled down the uplifted face. It was a tear of joy, for Cynthia was going to Sandy. From the unrest and unreality she had fled to him feeling confident that he would gather up the tangled and dropped threads of her life, and weave them, somehow, into a new and perfect pattern. She had so much to tell him! And he was there, close to her! Waiting, waiting for her to come to him and she could afford to dally by the wayside; gather up the precious memories—so like toys of the child she once had been and, by and by, she would go to him like a little girl tired of her day's wandering, and he would comfort her!
By the time Cynthia reached Theodore Starr's church all the heaviness of recent happenings was forgotten; it had no part in her thought. The church was gay in Christmas green and red holly berries. The morning sun, quite high by now, shone in the windows.
"Father!" whispered the girl as if in prayer, and then she knelt, where once her childish feet had borne her in terror, and buried her face in her hands. How well she now understood her dear, dead father! Strong in human love and sympathy, incapable of inflicting pain—even when pain would have been better and kinder than the lack of it—how like him she, the daughter, was! How she had slipped aside from the right path because weak desire to escape, or inflict pain, had been her portion. Well, she had suffered; had endured her exile; been mercifully spared from worse things, and now God had led her—home!
The unseen presence seemed to bend pityingly from the rude desk-pulpit and comfort the gentle heart of the returned wanderer.
Presently, choosing a time when the store near by was deserted, Cynthia ran from the church, across The Way, and escaped, unseen, to the trail leading up to Stoneledge. Her gay spirits returned and she sang snatches of song as she once used to sing. There was no sequence, no meaning of words, but the short sharp turns and trills were as wild and sweet as the bird notes. She tried Sandy's call—but her memory failed her there!
"Oh! the old tree," Cynthia ran to it. For months and months she had forgotten it, and the secret it held in its dead heart. Yes, the box was there! The box in which lay the outbursts of a girl's fancy and imaginings. With a mischievous laugh Cynthia removed the old letters and put them in the bag that hung from a girdle at her waist. Then she walked on to the old Walden Place. There a shock awaited her. What had happened? The crumbling walls had fallen in many places; but there were props and scaffoldings, too! Sandy had begun his work of redemption on the Great House. It was to be the home of the Markhams, but the surprised onlooker could not know that the property, taken by the county for unpaid taxes, had been bought in by Levi Markham in Sandy's name.
"Dear old Stoneledge!" And then Cynthia sat down upon a fallen log and knew the heavy heartedness of one who arrives too late to receive the welcome that was hushed forever. But suddenly her face brightened. In the general demoralization a portion of the house still stood—it was the wing, the library!
The roof had caved in, but the Significant Room stood open and stark to the glittering winter sunlight! Reverent hands had removed the furniture, books, and pictures; the stark and staring walls, with their stained and torn paper, were bared to the gaze of every chance passerby. Suddenly, to the yearning heart of the onlooker, a miracle appeared. The scene of devastation disappeared; there was a fragrance of honeysuckle and yellow roses in the sharp air and, in a dim, sweet, old, sheltered room stood a little girl with patched gingham gown and long smooth-hanging braids of hair, gazing up at a portrait that no eyes but hers had ever seen. It was little Madam Bubble and she was lovingly, proudly, exultingly, looking at "The Biggest of Them All!"
Unheeded, the tears rained down the cheeks of the woman standing by the ruins of her old home; she stretched her arms out tremblingly as if to hold the vision to the exclusion of all the rest of life.
"Oh! my Sandy, you have indeed cut your way through your enemies. Oh! my love; my dear, dear love."