The voice was in the valley. It was a quarter past one. He raked out the last faint embers of the fire, then he put out the lamp and carried his wet slippers into the hall. After his recent adventure it was but a simple matter to find his way up the richly carpeted stairs without a light and creep into the room where his wife slept.
She was sleeping now. So cunningly he crept into the room that she did not stir. He listened to the gentle rise and fall of her soft breath. Good woman! brave woman! He tiptoed past the bed to where the window was and managed to draw up the clever new-fangled blinds without making a sound. Yes, there was the star. That was all he wanted to see. Faint it was, so faint that faith was needed to believe that it was a star. But there was nothing else it could be.
The little sobbing voice, now no more than a whisper, that, too, was out there. Jim’s voice ... cracked he must be ... such sloppy notions ... the wind along that damned canal....
Suddenly he turned from the star. At the beck of a queer impulse he knelt by the bed, burying his eyes in the soft counterpane. He prayed for the Chaps. He prayed for Melia. He prayed for the life that lay with her, the life coming to them so miraculously they knew not whence, after all those years.
Could it be that Jim was coming back to complete his great beginnings? Coming back to witch the world with beauty? Just a fancy. But everything was just a fancy. Jim had said so once, looking at the sunset on the bank of that canal.
And he was one who....
L
THE months went by. In the meantime, upon the fields of France, was being decided the fate of the world for generations to come. Day followed day whose story will echo down the ages, but in the cottage with the green shutters at the head of the valley there was little to indicate that it was a time of destiny.