Word by word her voice had risen, growing stronger under the intense passion of her soul till it touched the highest note of her life, till it quivered like the tremulous tones of the flute thrilled at the holy reaches of the Infinite Beyond.
“He still believes!”
“Then where is he? Has he—”
She shrank back from him, for there was a smile on his features, and though faces grow old, smiles never do.
Reading her thoughts, he lifted her hand to his lips, and it was to her as when the mute touches the chords of the violin. The music was deep and plaintive, and the strain was one that makes all things possible.
“He is here!”
A cold, sleety rain was falling on the street outside, and the ice was forming on the elms of Beacon street. The shadows which sprang from the window that looked toward the west and the south lengthened themselves along the floor. Men hastened homeward in the gathering night, and a damp darkness settled down over the bleak landscape.
But they sat by the window that looked toward the west, and though they faced the sunset, they saw it not, for the morning had come.
CHAPTER XLIX
Far, far away in the Silver Creek Valley the sun was setting, and the purple shadow of the mystic Attacoa lay like a mighty altar upon the land. The Spring had come, and in her bosom she bore myriads of beautiful flowers wrapped in mantles of living green, as though she would make less bare the way for the shattered soldier in gray as he wearily wended homeward; as though she would make less bitter the sight of blackened chimneys or rotting doorsteps. Scarlet flowers sprang from the red earth of a thousand battlefields, and the deep periwinkle grew rich on the bodies of sunken heroes. Slowly and wearily the tattered men turned again homeward.