"It is true," passing his fingers over the low, broad, curiously moulded forehead. "My girl does not know what powers and subtile forces lie asleep beneath this white skin? I know. I know lights and words and dramas of meaning these childish eyes hold latent: that I will set free. I will teach your very silent lips a new language. You never guessed how like a prison your life has been, how unfinished you are; but I thank God for it, Grey. You would not have loved me, if it had been different; I can grow with you now, grow to your height, if—He helps me."
He took off his hat, and stood, looking silently into the deep blue above,—for the first time in his life coming to his Friend with a manly, humble look. His eyes were not clear when he spoke again, his voice very quiet.
"Good bye, Grey! I'm going to try to be a better man than I've ever been. You are my wife now in His eyes. I need you so: for life and for eternity, I think. You will remember that?"
And so, holding her to his heart a moment or two, and kissing her lips passionately once or twice, he left her, trying to smile as he went down the path, but with a strange clogging weight in his breast, as if his heart would not beat.
Going in, Grey found the old negro asleep over his knitting, the candle with a flaring black crust beside him.
"He waited for me," she said; and as she stroked the skinny old hand, the tears came at the thought of it. Everybody was so kind to her! The world was so foil of love! God was so good to her to-night!
Oth, waking fully as she helped him to his room-door, looked anxiously in her face.
"Er' ye well to-night, chile?" he said. "Yer look as yer did when yer wor a little baby. Peart an' purty yer wor, dat's true. Der good Lord loved yer, I think."
"He loves me now," she said, softly, to herself, as in her own room she knelt down and thanked Him, and then, undressed, crept into the white trundle-bed beside little Pen; and when he woke, and, putting his little arms about her neck, drew her head close to his to kiss her good-night, she cried quietly to herself, and fell asleep with the tears upon her cheek.
Her sister, in the next room to hers, with the same new dream in her heart, did not creep into any baby's arms for sympathy. Lizzy Gurney never had a pet, dog or child. She sat by the window waiting, her shawl about her head in the very folds McKinstry had wrapped it, motionless, as was her wont. But for the convulsive movement of her lips now and then, no gutta-percha doll could be more utterly still. As the night wore down into the intenser sleep of the hours after midnight, her watch grew more breathless. The moon sank far enough in the west to throw the beams directly across her into the dark chamber behind. She was a small-moulded woman, you could see now: her limbs, like those of a cat, or animals of that tribe, from their power of trance-like quiet, gave you the idea of an intense vitality: a gentle face,—pretty, the villagers called it, from its waxy tint and faint coloring,—you wished to do something for her, seeing it. Paul Blecker never did: the woman never spoke to him; but he noted often the sudden relaxed droop of the eyelids, when she sat alone, as if some nerve had grown weary: he had seen that peculiarity in some women before, and knew all it meant. He had nothing for her; her hunger lay out of his ken.