Brower passed his hand softly over this head and said no more. He was a patient husbandman; he would sow the good seed and wait for the harvest.
Ogden took the book home with him. He fluttered its leaves a few times; then he sat down on the edge of his bed and read the title-page for an hour. The next night he read it some more and dreamed about it. The next night he was reading it still, and he lay awake thinking of it until daylight.
On the following evening he took the old, familiar way to the West Side.
He found Abbie Brainard at home alone. Mary and her husband had gone out, and the baby had been put to bed.
Abbie was sitting in the half-gloom of one small lamp; the parlor was a little room, and a rather cheap and ugly one. But the lamp, thanks to its beflowered shade, was discreet and reticent in the disclosure of unprepossessing detail; besides, twenty lamps would not have had power to divert his thoughts from the channel through which they were now coursing.
On his entrance she started up to light the gas. She looked pale and worn, and older than he would have believed possible. But he looked older, too, and felt much older than he looked. The light beat down upon his silvered hair, and heightened the glance of pitying surprise that shone from her eyes.
In this increased illumination he saw that fortune had left her, as well as her youth and beauty, as well as the father whose life he had felt to make their union impossible, and whose memory might still keep it so. But she herself, in her own essence, was before him—the same courage, the same resolution, the same tenderness and fidelity. And in him she saw the only man she had ever seen, or had ever cared to see.
To her, he came as a messenger of pity to heal the wounds that knavery and scandal and violence had hacked upon her quivering heart. A messenger of pity, yes; but could he, by any possible chance, find her worthy of the pity that was akin to love?
To him, she appeared as the victim of his own faint-heartedness and faithlessness. After all that he had done to wring her heart, could he venture upon the crowning indignity of offering her his tarnished name?
To her, he stood there as a tower of refuge—tower from whose summit the swathing fogs might be cleared away by the warm breath of trust and confidence, and whose smirched walls—if smirched indeed they were—might be purified by the tears of love and the fingers of forgetfulness.