The crescent moon had waxed and waned since the night when it lighted the engineer's musings through the wind-parted live-oak boughs, and another slender bow gleamed in the pale, tinted haze of twilight. The month had gone, like a feverish dream, to the young schoolmistress, as she lay in her small, upper chamber, unconscious of all save alternate light and darkness, and rest following pain. When, at last, she crept down the short staircase to breathe the evening coolness, clinging to the stair-rail and holding her soft white draperies close around her, she saw the pink light lingering on the mountains, and heard the chorus to the “Sweet By and By” from the miners' chapel on the hill. It was Sunday evening, and the house was piously “emptied of its folk.” She took her old seat by the parlor window, and looked across to the engineer's office; its windows and doors were shut, and the dogs of the camp were chasing each other over the loose boards of the piazza floor. She laughed a weak, convulsive laugh, thinking of the engineer's sallies of old upon that band of Ishmaelites, and of the scrambling, yelping rush that followed. He must have gone East, else the dogs had not been so bold. She looked down the valley where the mountains parted seaward, the only break in the continuous barrier of land that cut off her retreat and closed in about the atom of her own identity. The thought of that immensity of distance made her faint.
There were steps on the porch,—not Captain Dyer's, for he and his good wife were lending their voices to swell the stentorian chorus that was shaking the church on the hill; the footsteps paused at the door, and Arnold himself opened it. He had not, evidently, expected to see her.
“I was looking for some one to ask about you,” he said. “Are you sure you are able to be down?”
“Oh yes. I've been sitting up for several days. I wanted to see the mountains again.”
He was looking at her intently, while she flushed with weakness, and drew the fringes of her shawl over her tremulous hands.
“How ill you have been! I have wished myself a woman, that I might do something for you! I suppose Mrs. Dyer nursed you like a horse.”
“Oh no; she was very good; but I don't remember much about the worst of it. I thought you had gone home.”
“Home! Where do you mean? I didn't know that I had ever boasted of any reserved rights of that kind. I have no mortgage, in fact or sentiment, on any part of the earth's surface, that I'm acquainted with!”
He spoke with a hard carelessness in his manner which make her shrink.
“I mean the East. I am homeless, too, but all the East seems like home to me.”