"She sent for them? She? Then they are—"
"Keep still, or I will tell you no more—they are two from whom you have been estranged, I think—your father and—"
"My sister?"
"No, the lady is not your sister, I think. She is tall, dark-haired, very beautiful and very queenly. Is that your sister?"
"No—no—that is not my sister—that is—heavens, can this be possible, or am I dreaming? Doctor, this agitation is hurting me worse than any presence could do. Send them in and trust me. I will be quiet—I will husband my life, for if I am not mad and you are not trifling, there may yet be something in the world worth living for."
The doctor laid his hand on the pulse of his patient, looked for a moment into his face, and then left the room. The next, two stepped within it—an old man with gray hair rapidly changing to silver, and a woman in the very bloom of youth and beauty. The eyes of the wounded man were closed. What was he doing?—collecting strength, or looking for it where it ever abides? No matter. Only one instant more, and then the two were on their knees by the bedside, where Eleanor Hill had just been kneeling—the father with the thin hand in his and murmuring: "Carlton! my brave, my noble son!" and Margaret Hayley leaning far over the low couch and saying a thousand times more in one long, tender, clinging kiss, light as a snow-flake but loving and warm as the touch of the tropic sun,—that shunned cheek and brow and laid its blessing on the answering lips!
Some of the words of that meeting are too sacred to be given: let them be imagined with the pressure of hands and the hungry glances of eyes that could not look enough in any space of time allotted them. But there were others, following close after, which may and must be given. Whole volumes had been spoken in a few words, and yet the book was scarcely opened,—when Margaret Hayley rose from her knees and bending over the bed ran those dainty white fingers through the strangely mottled hair on the brow of the invalid. Then she seemed to discover something incongruous in different portions of the face; and the moment after, stooping still closer down, she swept away the hair from the brow and scanned the texture of the skin at its edge. A long, narrow scar, its white gloss just relieved on the pallid flesh, crossed the forehead from the left temple to the centre of its apex. She seemed surprised and even frightened; then a look of mingled shame and pleasure broke over that glorious face, and she leaned close above him and said, compelling his eyes to look steadily into hers:
"Carlton Brand, what does this mean? I know that scar and the color that has once covered that hair and moustache! You are Horace Townsend!"
"I was Horace Townsend once, for a little while, Margaret," was the reply. "But it won me nothing, and you see for what a stern reality I have given up masquerading."
"And you plunged into the Pool to save that drowning boy. You went down into that dreadful schute and brought up the Rambler! You spoke to the Old Man of the Mountain at midnight and carried me away with your words on Echo Lake. And you—heaven keep my senses when I think of it!—you made love to me along the road down the Glen below the Crawford!