"Wait," he said gently. "I will help you!" She ceased to struggle and looked appealingly into his face. "I have not much to say, but it is for eternity. The man upstairs is now in no immediate danger. Mary, I have loved you as I did not believe myself capable of loving anyone. It is the glorious spot in the desert of my nature. I have been remorseless with men; it all seemed war to me, a war of Ishmaelites—civilized war is an absurdity. Had you found anything in me to love, I believe it would have made me another man, but you did not. And none can blame you. To-night, for every kind word you have spoken to Amos Royson, for the note you sent him to-day, he will repay you a thousandfold. Come with me." He half-lifted her up the steps and to the room of the sleeper. Then wringing out wet towels he bathed the face and neck of the unconscious man, rubbed the cold wrists and feet and forced cold water into the mouth. It was a doubtful half-hour, but at last the sleeper stirred and moaned. Then Royson paused.
"He will awaken presently. Give me half an hour to get into a batteau on the river and then you may tell him all. That—" he said, after a pause, looking out of the window, through which was coming the distant clamor of bells—"that indicates that Annie has waked and screamed. And now good-by. I could have taken your lover's life." He picked up the picture from the table, kissed it once and passed out.
Mary was alone with her lover. Gradually under her hand consciousness came back and he realized that the face in the light by him was not of dreams but of life itself—that life which, but for her and the gentleness of her woman's heart, would have passed out that night at Ilexhurst.
And as he drifted back again into consciousness under the willows of the creeping river a little boat drifted toward the sea.
Dawn was upon the eastern hills when Mary, with her rescued sister-in-law, crept noiselessly into The Hall. It was in New York that the latter read the account of her mortification. Norton was not there. She had passed him in her flight.
CHAPTER LV.
THE UNOPENED LETTER.
Soon it became known that Col. Montjoy had gone to his final judgment. Then came the old friends of his young manhood out of their retreats; the country for twenty miles about gave them up to the occasion. They brought with them all that was left of the old times—courtesy, sympathy and dignity.
There were soldiers among them, and here and there an empty sleeve and a scarred face. There was simply one less in their ranks. Another would follow, and another; the morrow held the mystery for the next.