“Where’s the Tramp?” everybody asked everybody else. No one knew. So the whole party scattered, to hunt. Miss Prince tried to persuade Danny to stay and rest. “The poor Tramp,” she said, “has had a terrible blow. I’m afraid it’s broken his heart. He strode off, early this morning, and I should say he’s gone off to walk miles and miles, to be alone with his grief.”
But nothing would restrain Danny—he insisted on going just as he was to search. He walked off through the wood, past the very spot where, last year, the Mysterious Tramp had come walking down the mossy path, and into their lives. What strange things had happened since then! After all, St. Antony, “the saint who finds lost things,” and whose statue had seemed to the Tramp to be pointing out that mossy path to him from his niche in the little grey church at the cross roads, had found the little lost girl!
Danny passed the gamekeeper’s cottage, and recalled that sad conversation in the early morning sunlight, when the Tramp had spoken of his quest of revenge, and Danny had told him it was not much use to expect to get his prayers heard, when he kept revenge in his heart.
“He must have forgiven his enemies,” Danny told himself, “and that was why God answered his prayer.” He walked on through the wood, and climbed the fence on to the road.
The church door stood wide open, as usual, and Danny crossed the road to turn in and say thank you for having been rescued from death, and for the finding of Mariette.
The church was very dim and quiet—full of a holy feeling. A golden ray of sunlight fell across the sanctuary. Danny knelt down reverently. At first he thought he was alone. Then he saw a dark figure, bowed down on the step, before the altar; and suddenly a strained, hoarse voice broke through the silence: “O God, this is too much, too much. I lived in the one hope that You were merciful, that You would give her back to me at last: and all the time she was dead, dead, dead. And yet ... if it’s Your Will ... I accept it....”
Danny got softly up and slipped out of the church. It is wrong to listen to any one speaking to another—but most of all to someone speaking alone to God. He sat down on a tree-stump in the churchyard, and waited. Presently a step made him glance up. The Mysterious Tramp stood framed in the archway of the porch, the sunlight falling on his thin, sad face. But there was a strange look of peace and steadfastness in his eyes that Danny had never seen there before.
He walked down the path and would have passed by had not Danny got up. Stepping up to the Tramp he took his arm.
“I say,” he said, “we must thank God for something. I’ve found your little Mariette.”
The Tramp reeled back, and then stood gazing at Danny in silence.