"Or counterfeits. Have you ever read 'Peer Gynt,' Dick?"
"Yes. Ibsen has a gloomy charm for me. I read all he writes in about the same way a child reads goblin tales. I enjoy the shivers."
"You remember the woman who gave Peer permission to marry the one pure love of his life but stipulated that she should forever sit beside them?"
"Yes!" Thornly smiled grimly. "That was a devilishly Ibsen-like idea."
"It was a truer touch than the young can understand. Those ghostly women of an early folly often sit beside a man and the later, purer love of his life. Some men are able to ignore the gray spectres and get a deal of comfort from the saner reality of maturer years; I never could. That girl"—he touched the closed book as if it were the grave that concealed her—"has always come between me and later desires for a home and closer ties. Her wonderful eyes, that looked so much and meant so little, have held me by a power that death and years have never conquered."
"She died then?" Thornly could no longer shield himself from the undesired knowledge; he must hear the end.
"Yes. She came from near here, poor little soul! I can never get rid of the impression that her death was hurried, not only by trouble, but sheer homesickness. You cannot fit these slow, quiet natures into the city's whirlpool. I was a young fellow, down for the summer. I was ensnared by her beauty, and hadn't sense enough to see the danger. She followed me to the city,—took a place in a shop, and was about as wretched as a sea gull in a desert. I was fool enough to think it a noble act to befriend her and so I complicated matters. My father must have found out, though I was never sure of that. Father was a man who kept a calm exterior under any emotion; but he sent me abroad, and I, not knowing that he had discovered anything, dared not confess. I meant to come back at a year's end and set all straight in some way. Good God! set things straight! How we poor devils go through the world knocking down things like so many ten pins and solacing ourselves with the fancy that when we finish the game we'll set the pins in place again! We never get that chance, Dick, take my word for it! Whatever the plan of life is, it isn't for us to set up the game! We may play fair, if it is in us, but once we get through, we need not hope for any going back process. When I returned at the end of two years, I could not find her! It wasn't love that set me upon the search for her, Dick, I always knew that; but I think it was the one decent element that has ever kept me from going to the deepest depths. I got discouraged, finally, and took our old family lawyer into my confidence."
"Did you look down here?" Thornly asked slowly. The tale had clutched him in a nightmarish way that shook his nerves.
"They don't come back here, my boy, once they tread the path of that poor child. They simplify morality in Quinton along with all else, and the one unpardonable sin suffices for them. They grade their society by their attitude toward that. But old Thorndyke took this place into consideration as a beginning, for he aided me in my search when he was convinced of my determination."
"And you never found her?" Thornly was leaning forward with hands close clasped before him, his face showing tense in the red glow of the fire.