Next day Andrew started back to Ovid, arriving in a state of feverish expectancy. No tidings of Judith there; and he knew not where to seek. That pleading voice still rang in his ears; by night, by day, it urged the message it had brought to him in the depths of far-off Muskoka, and by day and night he promised it peace, if he could only, only know where to go.
Time passed.
* * * * * *
The voice was dumb now. Only an acme of surpassing love can wing the will through space, and then only perhaps once in a lifetime does such a supreme moment come, and the will behind this love was shattered, for Judith Moore lay sick unto death, was tossing in the delirium of fever, or lying for days sunk in an apathy which words could not pierce. The papers were filled with accounts of her strange illness, daily bulletins of her condition appeared, her manager was showered with opprobrium for overworking her. She was dying. The best doctors said that the miracle was that she had lasted so long. Her little dark-faced manager went about feeling like a murderer, a Shylock, and a Judas, in one. The more so, as he felt he had given her the death-blow in one stroke—when he disregarded that letter. If he had only overworked her, he told himself he would have had no regrets. He would have made any reparation he could, but how on earth was he to find the yokel she was in love with? And what a battle she was having; and yet it was not such a very long one—from latest winter to spring.
Andrew was half crazed with love, which, since that winter night, had become almost unendurable through anxiety.
Now it was spring, and as he walked through his woods to the Morris house, he passed the crab-apple-trees in full bloom. He often went up to talk to garrulous Mrs. Morris. The little details she let fall about Judith were pearls of great price to him.
This day he was hardly within the door before Mrs. Morris said:
"Land sakes! but you're just the very person I was wanting to see. There's a gov'iment letter come to Miss Moore yesterday, and I thought you'd maybe know where to send it."
"Yes," said Andrew, feeling that the sign had come at last. "Give it me, and I'll see she gets it."
He took it, and with scarce a word went away, leaving Mrs. Morris considerably upset by his abruptness.