I watched him all that day; which is to say that I hung about the little town, and waited for him, wondering what he would do. I was not surprised when, as it was growing dark, he came out into the High Street, and set off at a swinging pace in the direction of the house I had known as belonging to old Patton. With the trot that had been mine for so long in the exercise ground of the prison, I went after him.
It was obvious that he was not so lucky as I had been, in that he must not enter the house. I crept into the grounds, and presently saw him standing on that very terrace on which I had stood with my Barbara—looking in at the windows and listening; I was below the terrace, crouched among some bushes, watching him, and watching the lighted windows. Presently a man walked to one of them, and opened it a little way, and returned into the room; and still I lay there, watching and thinking and wondering.
Then across the silence of the night there broke the sound of music, and the voice of a girl singing. I dropped my head upon my arms as I lay there; it seemed as though I could not bear it. For this was a song I had heard twenty years before in that very room, and it seemed to me that the voice was the same, coming hauntingly and wonderfully out of the past. The boy stood listening too; every word and every note floated to us clearly. It seemed as though out of the deep night of the years Barbara's voice came to me, singing to me as she had sung before.
The song ceased, and the last notes died away. The girl came to the open window, and looked out into the night; I saw the boy crouching there, watching her. Then from somewhere in the room a man's voice sounded quite clearly and distinctly.
"Barbara, you have your mother's voice."
She turned her head, and looked back into the room. "Thank you, father," she said; "I like to hear you say that."
I lay still, with a full understanding coming to me for the first time. This was not my Barbara; this was her child. I had come back, to find the mother gone, and the child in her place—in her very likeness. And I had come back, as it seemed, to touch again a love story as hopeless and as broken as my own had been. While the girl stood at the window, and the boy crouched in the shadows watching her, I lay there—thinking—thinking!
Presently the window was fastened, and the shutters drawn; lights began to appear in the upper windows. The boy lingered for a long time, but presently stole away; I crept after him. I did not know what to do, or what to think; I was like a lost soul wandering the earth, forlorn and hopeless and helpless. But he, going on through the night back to his lodging, was so much a part of myself, sprung up suddenly out of the past, that I could not bear to lose sight of him; I was close behind him when we came to the outskirts of the little town. There he turned suddenly, and faced about, looking at me.
"Why do you follow me?" he asked suspiciously.
"I meant no harm," I replied. "I beg you won't take any notice of me; I'm only a poor wanderer."