"Oh, yes, we won!" he said, a trifle bitterly, as he strode away.
Frances leaned faintly against the rail. It was over, the moment she had dreaded unspeakably, and she was in her rightful place again. She knew it; she blessed the night whose darkness had given her assurance. She blessed the unexpected meeting when there was no time for awkward confusion. She tapped her finger-tips on the rail and smiled to herself as she stood there, but the icy touch of the frost already forming roused her to a sense of the cold and chill. She hurried in, locked the shutters and then went running down the stairs.
"Father," she said with a happy laugh, "father, I am so glad to be at home." She leaned over his chair and put her arms about his neck.
"Are you?" there was a sparkle of joy in the professor's dark eyes; "so am I!" He slipped his arm about her and pulled her down on the arm of the chair. "You mustn't run away again; I don't know what to do without you; you must never run away again, too far!"
Lawson, though he was not given to poetical comparisons, was remembering with keen pain the first hour when he stood beneath the balcony and Frances had talked with him. It was morning then, it was night now; the sunlight was in the sky, only the cold stars now; she had come down to him blithely that warm, bright day when the world was a flood of sunshine and color; he had gone alone now, and it was cold and dark, and the color had drifted from the outside world and the joy from his heart.
XIII
About five o'clock the next day, Lawson, from sheer restlessness, was one of a crowd of University men waiting on the platform of the station in the ravine for the trains from the west and south already due; chaffing, singing, laughing, guying, cheering, they were waiting, according to the daily custom of a holiday hour, for whatever fun the arriving coaches might furnish.