"You look very tired." She seemed not to notice his silence. "I must not keep you. But there is a question I want to ask. Mother told me to-night that you and she are to be married. Is it true?"
How incredible she was, he thought. How perfect in her direct and simple dignity. Yet there had crept into her tone a wistfulness which broke his heart.
"Yes. It is true." He could do no less than meet her on her own high ground.
"She said," the girl's sweet, remote voice went on, "that you had loved each other all your lives. Is that true, too?"
He had hoped that he might be spared the bitterness of this, but since only one answer was possible, "It is true," he said hoarsely, "it is true that we loved each other—long ago."
"Long ago—and now?" He was to be spared nothing, it seemed. Her wide eyes searched his face. Lest she should read it too plainly, he bowed his head.
Then suddenly, even as she drew back from him, hurt to the heart, some trick of moonlight on his half-hidden face, linked to swift memory, showed her another moonlight night, a canoe, a story told—and in a flash the miracle had happened. Intuition had leaped the gulf of his enforced silence—Esther knew.
A great wonder grew in her eyes, an immense relief.
"Why," she spoke whisperingly, "I see, I know! She, my mother, is the girl you told me of. The girl you married—"
She did not need the confirmation of his miserable eyes. It was all quite plain. With a little broken sigh of understanding, she leaned her head against the gate post and, all child again, began to cry softly behind the shelter of her hands.