"No, I will get some more air. You will come back, won't you, when he is gone?"
"Yes; that is, if he doesn't stay too long," answered she with a bright smile.
Reynolds let his eyes follow her lithe and supple form as she walked briskly toward the house. She was carrying her hat in her hand and there was a bit of bright ribbon fluttering back over one shoulder and down her back, under her dark coil of hair. Touches of the Southern, the warm, the dusky, the dreamy, filled in the spaces of the picture beyond and around and over her. The light brush of her feet, in the crisp, fallen leaves and tufts of grass, came back to him, and along with it a thrill sweeter and more mournful than any chord of the Æolian harp. He shook himself, drew his hand across his face, arose and strolled idly about under the trees.
"It is worth a great effort," he was thinking, "and I shall succeed. Life gives up its measure of happiness at last to the brave and earnest. The past shall not mold my future and hers. I will take her and go abroad. She shall forget, among the beauties and interesting changes of travel, all this foolish panorama that our imaginations have made out of the coincidents and calamities for which neither of us is to blame. Oh, we shall be happy yet!" He held his head high and his eyes flashed with mingled hope and defiance.
When he thought of Milly White he added: "I shall not forget to repay her for all her faithfulness and childish affection."
Faithfulness and childish affection! Faithfulness and childish affection! the echo went ringing away into the remotest nooks of his consciousness. For a time he struggled hard and finally he hurled memory aside to give himself wholly up to forming plans for the future. But no one is vigilant enough to keep unwelcome guests long out of the chamber of his brain. They flit in so swiftly at any chance opening. How giant strong and yet how furtive and silent they are!
CHAPTER XVII.
DREAMS AND PLANS.
Reynolds lingered in the pleasant shadows of the magnolia trees, now slowly walking to and fro, now resting on some one of the old lichen-grown seats, his thoughts oscillating between the past and the future. He was aware, but not vividly, of how aimless and cowardly his life until now had been, and he was not quite sure that, no matter how strong might be his present purpose, the cowardice did not still linger with him. One thing he did realize perfectly: that he had not told the whole truth to Agnes Ransom. He might have avoided killing her husband had he been prompted by the highest moral motives. If before the act he had been as willing to fly from San Antonio and go bury himself in the lonely depths of Sand Mountain as he was after the blood was on his hands, he could to-day look up into the bright sweet sky and feel no load on his heart. But then, Heaven forgive the thought, Agnes could not have been his! It was with a dull, almost stolid sense of the gloom and hopelessness of his situation that he at the same time pondered the possibilities of the future. Throughout his consciousness, too, independent of the past or the future, the present fact of Agnes Ransom's love for him diffused itself with constantly increasing power, warmer, more vitalizing, more glorifying than sunshine and spring-tide and virile health combined. He knew and he did not know that he was trying to deceive himself and the woman he loved. He was aware and he was not aware that all his reasoning regarding the future was sophistry and that the things of the past were not dead. He smiled there under the dusky trees as if he were a guileless youth in the sweet wonder of his first love. He held his head high. Had he not flung all weights of memory behind him and set his eyes on a fair and calm future? Yes, he was going to be happy. He was already happy. He would take Agnes far away, beyond the sea, where no hint of the past could ever come. At length he caught a distant glimpse of Beresford going away, and then a little thrill of pity stole into his bosom. The man looked lonely, even at that distance, and moved as if bearing a burden of trouble, or so at least Reynolds' imagination colored the apparition.
Mrs. Ransom did not come forth immediately. She had borne the interview with firmness, and had tried to soften with such art as she could command the wound she was forced to inflict. Beresford was a gentleman as well as a man, and whilst he had urged his plea with all the passion of a strong nature, he had taken his final dismissal with the dignity of a courageous, if not lofty soul.