March went back to the sylvan retreat that may be regarded as the stage set for the principal scenes of our story. Step and heart were light, and the same might be said of a brain that whirled like a feather in a gale. While he had been loath to admit the gravity of the misgivings that had embittered the slow hours between 11:30 A. M. and 7 o’clock P. M. of that eventful Sunday, he was keenly alive to the rapture of their removal. What a boorish bat he had been to suffer a suspicion of the lofty rectitude of the noblest woman upon earth to enter his mind! How altogether simple and convincing was her explanation of what should have been no mystery to any honorable man! Yet he could not be ashamed, in the fullness of his happiness. He called himself all the hard names in his vocabulary with cheerful volubility, and gloried in the lesson he had thus learned of implicit trust in the girl he loved. No accumulation of circumstantial evidence or even the witness of the eye should ever call up another shadow of a shade of doubt. Among other occasions for thankfulness was the recollection that he had not let a lisp of what he had seen last night and suspected this morning, escape him in conversation with his mother and sister. He found himself tracing, with a fine sense of the drollery of the conceit, the analogy between prostrate Dagon, sans arms, legs, and head, and the suspicion which had menaced the destruction of his happiness. Mutilated, prone, and harmless, it lay on the threshold of the temple of love and truth, ugly rubbish to be thrust forever out of sight.
He had hardly noticed, in the ecstasy of relief, Hetty’s haste to be gone after she had explained her nocturnal industry. He passed as lightly over the incoherence that had replied to his question when he could see her again.
“Give me time to think! Not for a day or two! Not until you hear from me!” she had said just before reaching the gate.
He was shrewd enough to see how well taken was his vantage ground. She had not demurred at his stipulation. He was positive, in the audacity of youth and passion, that she would never utter the words he had dictated. The turf under the tree was flattened by her reclining form. He lay down upon it, his arms doubled under his head for a pillow, Thor taking his place beside him. The golden green changed into dull ruddy light, this into purple ash, and this into gray that was at first warm, then cold. The second vesper bell had set the air to quivering and sobbed musically into silence that embalmed the memory of the music. Rapt in dreams, in summer fragrance, and in tender dusks, the lover lay until the stars twinkled through rifts in the massed leaves. Now and then, the far-off roll of an organ and the sweet hymning of accompanying voices were borne across his reverie, as the wanderer through the twilight of an August day meets waves of warm, perfumed air, or currents of balsamic odors floating from evergreen heights.
At nine o’clock the moon showed the edge of a coy cheek above the horizon hills, and shortly thereafter March heard the click of the garden gate. Instinctively he put out his hand to keep Thor quiet, an unwarrantable idea that Hetty might revisit the spot darting through his mind. The shuffling of feet over the sward quieted his leaping heart. In another minute he distinguished the outlines of a figure stealing across the moonlit spaces separating black blotches of shade. As it neared the covert he spoke quietly, not to alarm the intruder.
“Good-evening, Homer.”
“O Lord!” The three-quarter-witted wight bounded a foot from the ground, then collapsed into a shaking huddle.
“It is I—Mr. Gilchrist,” March hastened to add. “I am sorry I frightened you.”
“Now—I was jes a-lookin’ fer a light I see from the back porch down this ’ere way,” uttered Homer, in an agitated drawl.
March could see the coarse fingers rubbing against the backs of his hands, and a ray of light touched the pendulous jaw.