"Yes, the way I took before," I whispered, without looking at her. "God is good; he has given my enemy into my hands at last!"
CHAPTER X
[TOO LATE!]
For now it all seemed straight and plain before me; now I saw clearly the pointing finger of Fate, and trembled no more at the task I had to face. Who was I, that I should ever have hung back at all, or should ever have dreaded the road on which my feet had been firmly set from the first. I looked down at the sleeping girl, and my heart was filled with a great gratitude that God had snatched me from death and from prison, and had reserved me for this. I thanked Him humbly that there was no other man in all the wide world so trained and fitted for the task as I was.
I saw it all clearly enough at last. The time was coming when this poor tangled love story would be set right; when the boy would come naturally and by instinct to the girl, and would take her in his arms, with a very perfect understanding of her purity and her innocence; so much had been ordained from the first. If they gave a thought to me, it would only be as the poor unknown grey-headed man that had been called Tinman, and had flitted into their lives for a brief hour, and flitted out again, and so been done with. Even the woman who stood beside me—that elder Barbara—was only mercifully permitted to look on at the completion of the love story she and I might have lived ourselves. After all, God had been very good to me.
"I don't understand," Barbara was saying to me, as we stood beside the sleeping girl. "What way will you take?—what will you do?"
"You will know presently," I whispered, lest I should wake the sleeper. "In any case, I want you to promise one thing: I want you to take the girl back to her father, and to leave her safely in his hands. Promise me—swear to me that nothing shall turn you from that purpose; nothing that you hear—nothing that you suspect. All that I hope to do, and all that I shall strive to do, will be brought to naught if you fail me in that."
"I promise, my dear," she said solemnly. "But Olivant?"