In the hall they met John Charter; he had been out and was splashed with snow from the drifts.
"We're going; we thought we'd better," Pamela told him, in a low voice. "But to-morrow I'm coming back to be with Rachel."
John looked at her fresh, kind face. "I wish you would!" he said fervently.
She put out her hand and he took it, aware for the first time that she understood.
He helped them into the motor, for Astry was with Sedley and Dr. Macclesfield in the library beside Belhaven's body. When they were gone Charter went out to the end of the long terrace. The whitened landscape seemed to make every object clear and he noticed the heavy sweep of the big hemlocks under their load of snow. Behind him the house was full of lights; servants moved silently to and fro, for the business of death was there.
He felt the shock of it; this sudden end had found him filled with anger against the dead. He had been in deep rebellion against the fate that had thrust this man into Rachel's life; he had called him coward a thousand times, and now he was overtaken with the abrupt pause that follows the death of an adversary, the feeling that silences reproach on the lips of the living and appeals from man's judgment to that supreme tribunal where there can be neither anger nor malice nor false-witness, and where the soul, climbing slowly and painfully up that long way that men call life, may have already made an atonement deep as life itself. The overwhelming certainty that as a man sows he shall reap was brought home to him in that moment when, thinking of the dead man within, he thought also of Eva, who seemed to have saved herself. But he had seen Eva when the body of Belhaven was borne in, a mute witness of the deed that she had done, and he knew that Eva had need of Astry's mercy, as great as Belhaven's need of salvation.
Standing on the terrace, Charter looked out across the frozen landscape and saw, a long, long way off, the light in the open door of Belhaven's house, where they made ready for his silent return. That light upon the snow made a long and exceedingly narrow way, and over it he seemed to see the figure of the woman he loved coming toward him. For, by her one unthinking act to save her sister, Rachel, too, had stumbled upon the way, and he seemed to see her traveling along it now, stooping always to help those who had stumbled lower or fallen, and bearing always the burden of another's transgressions, but coming at last through the light to meet him and reaping, not in pain and sorrow, but in joy and peace, because her love was greater than theirs.
THE END.