Her arms crept up to his shoulders. "If I should do a thing like that God would never forgive me, and you—if some day you found out what I had done—would never have faith in me again. Would you?"
She hid her face against his shoulder, her heart beating wildly, her body trembling. For she had seen another movement in the willows and she was afraid that Donald McRae was going away.
"It was only a dream," Peter was saying, holding his arms closely about her. "You are not afraid of dreams, Mona?"
And then from behind them came a voice.
"God forgive me my weakness!" it cried. "Peter—Peter——"
Donald McRae stood out in the open at the edge of the willow thicket. He had forgotten the rags and mud that covered him, and was no longer a fugitive with the lines of a hunted man in his face. The present was for a space obliterated—the present with its menace of the law, its exhaustion and its poverty; and he was standing once more in the warm glow of that day of six years ago when he had said good-by to Peter. In those seconds, when Peter stood shocked into deathlike stillness by the sound of the voice behind him, Mona could see Donald McRae with his outreaching arms; but as Peter turned slowly, facing his father, the strain broke in a hot flood of tears that blinded her vision.
And then——
"Dad!"
It was the strangest cry she had ever heard from Peter's lips, and with an answer to that cry in her own choking breast she turned away as the two men came into each other's arms. She passed out of sight along the edge of the pond, scarcely seeing the path ahead of her, and unconsciously she kept repeating Peter's name in a whisper, as if—even though she had prayed so long for this hour to come—she had never quite expected its fulfilment.