Wilfred’s plans were soon laid. Bundling up such clothing as he had been able to snatch up in the moment allowed, he waited a short time to see if the house would take fire. It did not, somewhat to his disappointment. To return to Riles would, he knew, be to court disaster. He had a very different purpose now in view. Of late he had been reading the papers at Grants’ in the evenings, and had learned that the Government of Canada was prepared to give a quarter section to any man who would live on it and establish a farm. It was a great day when his poor, narrow imagination first made the leap that supposed him—Wilfred Vickery, Barnardo boy—the owner of a farm in his own right. But when the supposition had once been made it grew upon him with a resistless fascination. He was now eighteen. The problem of getting West was a small thing to him. The harvest season was approaching, and he could work. He had been nursing this great thought for weeks, and now, at this moment, it became evident that he must strike out and boldly grapple with destiny. And he had another purpose, of which he scarcely dared think, but which was in reality the foundation of his whole desire.
Perhaps it was this deeper purpose that directed his footsteps again to the Grant farmhouse. He hardly knew the road he had taken until the building loomed up before him, solemn but friendly in the first gray suggestion of dawn. He walked quietly around and looked at all the windows, but there was no gleam of light. If only she would appear! If only he might tell her of his plans, his hopes—if only he dared! But she was sleeping, dreaming, perhaps, of “the fir trees, grim and high,” and he dared not take the chance of discovery by remaining until the family were astir. He must leave, silently and without good-bye; he must pass out of her life, for the present at least, as a leaf that falls in a stream and is borne away in the darkness. With a sigh he turned to go, down the little path that lead out by way of the garden. A few steps brought him to the door of the summer-house. Here he paused again; the place was sanctified with the memory of one or two holy evenings; he stepped inside, if only to prolong the sweet sorrow of his leave-taking.
As he stood, framed in the doorway, his vision was drowned in the blank darkness of the little building. But as one sense becomes inoperative another grows more alert, and in a moment his quick ears caught the sound of easy, regular breathing. Someone was sleeping in the summer-house; probably one of the boys. His first impulse was to steal silently away, but a strange fascination led him toward the little rustic couch across the farther wall. Hands outstretched, he crept toward it in the darkness, until his fingers touched a mass so uncertain their nerve-tips scarce detected it. He rubbed finger and thumb together, and knew that silken tresses lay between.
With a great bound his heart almost seemed to drive the air from the lungs; the veins of his neck bulged as though they would burst. He sank upon his knees, leaning forward. A flood of warm air flushed across his tense face; it beat and rebeat like the waves of a sea, and in that moment the boy understood that Time is but a segment calendared out of the circle of Eternity. He could not be mistaken. The elective affinities are never deceived. With a great breath he drew his shoulders back. Within his reach, within the very touch of his finger-tips, was the prize of life compared to which heaven and earth resolved into vague, uncertain promises!
She stirred slightly, as though some wandering thought from the material world had blown in airy ruffles across the smooth lying haven of her spirit land. Some consciousness of human presence—strange element of the divine, which, like a sudden light on sleeping eyes can pass the gates of slumber without unbarring them—was calling the mind back to its vacated chambers. Wilfred remained kneeling, thrilled with the strange exaltation of triumph and humility. His presence was operating upon her, like the magnet upon steel. In a moment she would speak. She would call him by name.
His eyes, straining through the darkness, caught the outline of her face. One hand lay across the forehead, palm upward. It fell listlessly to her side. She turned her head gently toward him, and a low sound escaped her lips.
His ear had not been quick enough. He leaned close to her, alert for the moment when she would call his name.
“Ray,” she murmured. “Oh, Ray, they said you would not come back.”
As a hypnotist may convert his subject into human stone by the utterance of a single word, the heart of the Barnardo boy froze as that low sound struck his ear, and his tense face moulded itself in deep, sudden furrows. Not all the years of the future should quite efface those quick-cut channels of disillusionment.
He sat back on his heels, his hands limp by his sides. For a moment—one brief moment—an unworthy warfare raged in his nature. How completely she was in his power! But the thought had not crossed his mind when, by some strange instinct, he removed his hat from his dishevelled head, as one might do in a holy presence. For a long while he sat, staring at the blank wall before him; then quietly rose and stole toward the door.