He fell brokenly into his chair and lay against his desk. The Bishop rose and walked from the room.
When he heard the door close, the man got up and going to the door barred it.
He came back and sat awhile, his head leaning heavily upon his propped hands.
He opened a drawer of his desk and looked at a smooth, glinting black and steel thing that lay there. Then he shut the drawer with a bang that went out to the Bishop listening in the outer office. It was a sinister, suggestive noise, and for an instant it chilled that good man’s heart. But his ears were sharp and true and he knew immediately that he had been mistaken.
Stanton pulled out another drawer, unlocked a smaller compartment within it, and from the latter took a small gold-framed picture. He set it up on the desk between his hands and looked long at it, questioning the face in the frame with a tender, diffident expression of a wonder that never ceased, of a longing never to be stilled.
The face that looked out of the picture was one of a quiet, translucent beauty. At first glance the face had none of the striking features that men associate with great beauty. But behind the eyes there seemed to glow, and to grow gradually, and softly stronger, a light, as though diffused within an alabaster vase, that slowly radiated from the whole countenance an impression of indescribable, gentle loveliness.
Clifford Stanton had often wondered what was that light from within. He wondered now, and questioned. Never before had that light seemed 302 so wonderful and so real. Now there came to him an answer. An answer that shook him, for it was the last answer he would have expected. The light within was truth––truth. It seemed that in a world of sham and illusions and evasions this one woman had understood, had lived with truth.
The man laughed. A low, mirthless, dry laugh that was nearer to a sob.
“Was that it, Lucy?” he queried. “Truth? Then let us have a little truth, for once! I’ll tell you some truth!