Then she reëntered the cabin; but not to sink into a chair, not to release her bruised feet from the weight of her tiredness.
She cleared the table and piled the dishes in a huge pan upon the little stove. Upon the stove she discovered water heated in a kettle and she poured it, splashing, over the panful. She found three cloths of incredible blackness drying upon a little string in a corner by the stove, and after smiling very tenderly upon them she abandoned them in favor of a clean hand towel.
She restored the washed dishes to their obvious places upon the shelves and with a broom she battled with the dust upon the floor and drove it out the open door. Then she swept up the hearth, singing as she swept, and tidied the arrangement of books, bait and tobacco upon the mantel, fingering them with shy curiosity.
"Maria Angelina!" said a voice at the doorway and Maria Angelina turned with a catch at her heart.
It had taken Barry Elder a long time to retrace those steps of his.
Twice he had stopped in deep thought. Once he had pulled out a leather folder from his pocket and after regarding its sheaf of papers had sat down upon a stone and deliberately opened a long, much-creased-from-handling letter. It was dated a week before and it was headed York Harbor. It concluded with an invitation—and a question.
After reading that letter Barry remained sunk in thought for a time longer than the reading had taken.
All of his past was in that letter—and a great deal of his future in that invitation.
Then he went deeper into his pocketbook and took out a small photograph. It was the one she had given him when he went to France—when she had been willing to inspire but not to bless him. For a long time, soberly, he gazed at the picture it disclosed, at the fair presentment of delightful youth.
Never had he looked at that picture in just that way. He had known longing before it, and he had known bitterness quite as misplaced and quite as disproportionate.