"I didn't care to tell where I was going, in case my mission should fail," the young fellow imparted. "I went after work—good, clean, well-paying work—and I got it. I can hold up my head at last."
A look of pride had come upon his face, but his lip was trembling. That the fight he had waged with himself was manly, and worthily won, to some considerable extent, was a thing that Garrison felt. He had no intention of preaching and no inclination for the task.
"'Nuff said," he answered. "Shake. Here comes the soup."
They shook hands over the table. No further reference was made to a personal subject. Some way Garrison felt that a man had come to take the place of a boy, and while he reflected that the fight was not yet absolutely finished, and the bitterness of it might remain for some time yet to come, nevertheless he was thoroughly convinced that through some great lesson, or some awakening influence, Foster had come to his manhood and could henceforth be trusted to merit respect and the trust of all his fellow-beings.
Garrison, alone, at nine o'clock, had an impulse to hasten off to Branchville. In the brief time of lying unconscious on the floor when Wicks struck him down, he had felt some strange psychic sense take possession of his being, long enough for the room that Hardy had occupied in Hickwood to come into vision, as if through walls made transparent.
He had merely a dim, fading memory that when he awoke he had spoken to Dorothy, telling her to help him to go, that the hiding-place of Hardy's will had been at last revealed. As he thought of it now, on his way to Dorothy's abiding place, he shook his head in doubt. It was probably all an idle dream.
CHAPTER XXXIV
THE RICHES OF THE WORLD
Dorothy was waiting to see him. She was still excited, still anxious concerning himself. She had quite forgotten his words about the will in her worry lest the blow on his head had proved more serious than had at first appeared.
He met her quietly in a large, common parlor—the duplicate of a thousand such rooms in New York—and was thoroughly determined to curb the impetuous surging of his feelings. She was wearing a bunch of his carnations, and had never seemed more beautiful in all her wondrous moods of beauty.