They had admitted—or so he once thought—of no shading nor explanation. The questioner was not the type to deal unsteadily with a problem, and Gaston had been too simple and direct to note fine points or shadings. Perhaps neither of them had understood. Life had been so fair until the terrible thing had loomed up. It had come like a cataclysm—how could they, young and inexperienced as they had been, deal with the situation justly?
Suppose now she stood before him, wonder-eyes raised, seeking his soul's truth; hands resting in his until he should speak. Would he speak again those two crude, fatal words? Would she drop her hands letting his soul sink, by so doing, into the blackness which had engulfed it?
That was the torturing problem that Gaston was working out up in the lonely St. Angé woods; but he seemed no nearer the answer than when he had come to the place, by mistake, a few years back, and decided to stay there simply because it was as desirable as any other forsaken spot, while he was debarred from the Paradise of life.
The lamp flickered fretfully, and the spasmodic flare showed the rigid face torn with the emotions that were racking the soul laid bare before its God and its own consciousness.
What had the dreary, desolated years done for him? He was a fool. Why had he not taken what was possible, since the ideal was dashed from him?
This girl, way off there behind the hideous shadow, had been wiser. She had replaced his memory by living love; why should not he take the poor substitute that the Solitude offered, and warm the barren places of his heart and life with the faint glow?
It was a bad hour for Temptation to assail John Gaston.
The armour of self-wrought strength was off. Suffering was flaying the naked despair and yearning; and just then Temptation knocked softly and pitifully at the door of the outer room!
Gaston had done more while he had hidden in the woods than he was aware of. He had developed something akin to second sight. Loneliness and empty hours had strengthened this as blindness intensifies other senses to abnormal keenness. Gradually he had grown to believe that a man's life, complete and prearranged, lies stretched before, and occasionally some, when the circumstances are propitious and the soul has a certain detachment that ignores the bodily claims, can leap over the now and here, and catch a glimpse of the future and what it holds. This vague sense had come to Gaston more than once during the past year or two—the seeing and hearing of that which had held no part in what was, at the moment, occurring, but which he noted later had become a fact in his life.
That feeble knock dragged the man's consciousness away from the pictured face; away from his wavering indecision; away from the darkening room with its foul smell of oil: he knew who stood outside in the moonlighted, fragrant summer night, and he wondered if he were going to open that barred door to her. He waited for a glimpse of what was in store for them both.