Two or three evenings later, Doctor Horton received an urgent summons from one of his patients, who lived at the end of a new and almost uninhabited street. A lamp at the corner of the main street lighted it for a short distance, beyond which the darkness was intense. When just opposite the lamp, and about to cross over, he observed a woman pass swiftly across the lighted space in the direction toward which he was himself going. There was no mistaking the erect figure and graceful gait—it was Lilly O'Connell. After an instant of wondering what could have brought her there at such an hour, for it was late, according to village customs, he changed his intention as to crossing, and kept down the other side.
The sight of this girl brought back afresh that brief, unpleasant scene with Florence, which he had tried to forget, but which had recurred to him very often, and always with a keen sting of pain and shame. His faith in the woman he loved was so perfect! Should hers be less in him? For him there was no happiness without repose. To doubt, to be doubted, would end all. He walked on in the darkness, lost in such thoughts, and quite forgetting where he was, but all at once he became aware of other footsteps behind him, and involuntarily looking back, he saw, just on the edge of the lamp-lit space, the figure of a man—a tall figure, with a certain panther-like grace of movement. There was but one such in the town, that of Commeraw, the mulatto.
The sight gave him a disagreeable shock. That he was following Lilly O'Connell he had no doubt. Could it be true, then, the rumor to which he had given so little credence? He remembered, now, that he had seen this fellow hanging about at various times and places when she was present. Might it not have been pretence—her proud indifference and scornful evasion of his advances? He asked himself, with a hot flush of mortification, the same question which Florence had put to him. It was true that he had many times openly defended her. He had been forced to do so by that quality of his nature which moved him always to espouse the cause of the weak. Perhaps he had elevated this girl to a higher plane than she deserved to occupy. After all, it would not be strange if her heart, in its longing for sympathy, had turned toward this man of her dead mother's race. Then her face, so sensitive, so overshadowed with sadness, came before him, and he could not think of it in juxtaposition with the brutal face of Commeraw. He banished the thought with disgust.
In the meantime, the man could be seen creeping along, a black shadow thrown into faint relief against the white sand of the overhanging bank. There was something furtive and stealthy in his actions which excited Horton's fears. He saw that he had at last overtaken the girl, and he quickened his own pace until he was so near that the sound of their voices came over to him.
"There is no other answer possible," she was saying. "You must never speak to me in this way again."
She would have gone on, but the man placed himself before her. There was a deliberation in the way he did so which showed his consciousness of power.
"This is a lonesome place," he said, with a short, cruel laugh.
She made no answer.
The man muttered an imprecation.