As he walked and breathed the pure air in an ecstasy of appreciation, he saw coming down the path under the red-tinted oaks one who might have been the spring expressed in physical form. Frances, her hands filled with dainty blossomings and leaf-buds, was walking blithely toward him, her face bright as the sky, and the peace that brooded upon it sweet as the sunshine on mountain and field. He could not have moved if he would, and he would not if he could. Hidden by the tangle of cedar and vine and bramble, in the fence corner, he could watch her through half closed eyes whose glance was a caress. Turning his elbow on the old chestnut rail fence he watched her, scarcely breathing till she was abreast of him. Then he spoke, but only her name.
"Miss Holloway!
"I startled you! You must pardon me: you see I have been watching the players." He motioned towards the golf links. "Will you not wait a while," he begged; "I was thinking of you the moment I saw you. It was a dream come true," he added softly, "Thank God our dreams do come true, sometimes!
"There is something I must tell you," he said, after a moment's silence, while he strove to find speech for the thoughts he could not frame to words, but which were choking him for utterance. "You will wait?" for Frances had been too astonished to say anything beyond her murmured greeting, and stood startled, as if for instant flight, the red and white coming and going on her clear cheek.
"Last winter when I came to you," he blundered, and then the anger in her face gave him sudden cool courage, "I was not free to do so—so you thought, I thought otherwise; you will do me the honor to believe it," coldly; "for fear of some misadventure I told you—"
"I have not forgotten," said Frances gently, as if to save him the pain of putting the thought into speech.
"Now, now—I have not said it yet, scarcely told it myself!—do not let me frighten you—I am free!"
The delicate flowers slipped from Frances' nerveless hands down to the ground and lay there in the path between them.
"Frances, I am free. Do you know what it means? That woman who bore my name is dead;" if he never spoke her name in reverence before he did so now, "she is dead. Did you think I went away for pleasure, Christmas?" he hurried on, almost breathlessly. "She wrote to me. I had not heard from her for five years. My lawyer was told never to mention her name to me. But she wrote that very day, no, the next,"—he put his hand to his head confusedly, he could not tell her all the pain, the bitterness, he had felt,—"she wrote begging me to come. She was dying, she said. I went; I telegraphed my father to meet me there. She saw us both; she had not been so bad, perhaps, as we thought; it was the devil of show and selfishness and restlessness which possessed her, and I must have seemed to her at the first, long ago, to be a very fool, to be wheedled, to be—I don't think she ever dreamed it was in me to leave her. She had taken her divorce in half-angry, half-amused carelessness; so long as she got what she wanted, what did it matter, and that was wealth! I must tell you this, Frances, once for all, then it shall be dead between us, as she is. The doctor said she would live a week. I came back, knowing this. I saw you! You will never know how I was tempted, but there was a vileness I could not sink to! I could not build dreams of happiness upon the shortness of her life!
"If I had not studied until there was no thought day by day, week by week—work! They think I love it. God! I have been buried, dead, have been buried, and now am alive!"