“Kathryn, you mean you will marry me; you will––do this for me and her?”
“Yes.”
Just then Aunt Polly came into the room. Her quick, keen eye took in the scene and her gentle heart throbbed in sympathy. She came over to the two and hovered near them, patting Northrup’s shoulder and Kathryn’s head indiscriminately. She crooned over them and finally got them to the dining-room and the evening meal.
An early start for the morrow was planned, and by nine o’clock Kathryn went to her room.
Northrup was restless and nervous. There was much to be done before he left. He must see Rivers and finish that business––it might have to be hurried, but he felt confident that by raising Larry’s price he could secure his ends. And then, because of the finality in the turn of events, Northrup desperately decided upon a compromise with his conscience. Strange as it now seemed he had, before his talk with Kathryn, believed that he was done forever with his experience, but he realized, as he reconsidered the matter, that hope, a strange, blind hope, had fluttered earlier but that now it was dead; dead!
Since that was the case, he would do for a dead man––Northrup gruesomely termed himself that––what the dead man could not do for himself. Surely no one, not even Rivers, would deny him that poor comfort, if all were known. He would write a note to Mary-Clare, go early in the morning to that cabin on the hill and leave it––where her eye would fall upon it when she entered.
That the cabin was sacred to Mary-Clare he very well knew; that she shared it with no one, he also knew; but she would forgive his trespassing, since it was his only way in honour out––out of her life.
Very well, then! At nine-thirty he decided to go over to the Point again and, if he found Larry, finish that business. If Larry were not there, he would lie in wait for him and gain his ends. So he prepared for another night away from the inn, if necessary.
Aunt Polly, hovering on the outskirts of all that was going on, materialized, as he was about leaving the house like a thief of the night.