“Don't git worried about me, ma'am,” said he, “I'm hopeless. For twenty year now I been wearin' crape on my hat in memory of my departed virtues.”
After the rear had dropped down river from Redding, Carroll and Orde returned to their deserted little box of a house at Monrovia.
Orde breathed deep of a new satisfaction in walking again the streets of this little sandy, sawdust-paved, shantyfied town, with its yellow hills and its wide blue river and its glimpse of the lake far in the offing. It had never meant anything to him before. Now he enjoyed every brick and board of it; he trod the broken, aromatic shingles of the roadway with pleasure; he tramped up the broad stairs and down the dark hall of the block with anticipation; he breathed the compounded office odour of ledgers, cocoa matting, and old cigar smoke in a long, reminiscent whiff; he took his seat at his roll-top desk, enchanted to be again in these homely though familiar surroundings.
“Hanged if I know what's struck me,” he mused. “Never experienced any remarkable joy before in getting back to this sort of truck.”
Then, with a warm glow at the heart, the realisation was brought to him. This was home, and over yonder, under the shadow of the heaven-pointing spire, a slip of a girl was waiting for him.
He tried to tell her this when next he saw her.
“I felt that I ought to make you a little shrine, and burn candles to you, the way the Catholics do—”
“To the Mater Dolorosa?” she mocked.
He looked at her dark eyes so full of the sweetness of content, at her sensitive lips with the quaintly upturned corners, and he thought of what her home life had been and of the real sorrow that even yet must smoulder somewhere down in the deeps of her being.
“No,” said he slowly, “not that. I think my shrine will be dedicated to Our Lady of the Joyous Soul.”