All trace of resentment left his eyes as he realized the ghastly pallor of those features––all the ragged horror of that oozing welt which he had only half seen in that first moment when he was clinging to consciousness with clenched teeth. It was not nice to look at, and the light that replaced that sudden flare of bitterness was so new that he did not even recognize it himself at first.
It was a clearer, steadier, surer thing than he had ever known them to reflect before; all hint of lost-dog sophistication was gone; even the smile that touched his thin, pain-straightened lips was different somehow. It was just as whimsical as before, and just as half-mirthless––gentle as it always had been whenever he thought at all of her––but there was no wistful hunger left in it, and little of boyishness, and nothing of lurking self-doubt.
“Why, she couldn’t have known,” he went on then, still murmuring aloud. “She couldn’t have been 93 expected to believe anything else. I––I’m not much to look at––just now.”
He even forgot that he had tried to follow her––forgot that her cloak had thrown him sprawling in the doorway.
“I ought to have told her,” he condemned himself. “I shouldn’t have let her go––not like that.”
In the fullness of this new certainty of self that was setting his pulses hammering, he even turned toward the sleeping town, thickly blanketed by the shadows in the valley, in a sudden boyish burst of generosity.
“Maybe they didn’t mean to lie, either,” he mused thoughtfully. “Maybe they haven’t really meant to lie––all this time. They could have been mistaken, just as she was tonight––they certainly could have been that.”
He found and filled a basin with cold water and washed out the cut until the bleeding had stopped entirely. And then, with the paper which that afternoon’s mail had brought––the sheet with the astounding news of Jed The Red, which Old Jerry prophesied would put Boltonwood in black letters on the map of publicity––spread out on the table before him, he sat until daybreak poring over it with eyes that were filmed with preoccupation one moment and keenly strained the next to make out the close-set type.
Not long before dawn he reached inside his coat and brought out a bit of burnished white card and set 94 it up in front of him against the lamp. There was much in the plump, black capitals and knobby script of Judge Maynard’s invitation which was very suggestive of the man himself, but Young Denny failed to catch the suggestion at that moment.
He never quite knew when that decision became final, nor what the mental process was which brought it about. Nor did he even dream of the connection there might have been between it and that square of cardboard lying in front of him. Just once, as the first light came streaking in through the uncurtained window beside him, he nodded his head in deliberate, definite finality.