He avoided her appealing eyes, looking away into the blue, sunlit distance. His lip shook when he answered:
“Some day I'll tell you all about it. I'll unfold it to you like a book, page by page, chapter by chapter. It is a story that opens in the blackness of night and ends in the blaze of a new day.”
“I know what you mean—oh, I know!” Ethel sighed. “The news of that night was my first realization of life's grim cruelty. Somehow I felt— I suppose other imaginative girls are the same way—I felt that it was a sort of personal matter to me because I had met you as I had. I didn't blame you. I couldn't understand it fully, but I felt that it was simply a continuation of your ill-luck. I cried all that night. I could not go to sleep. I kept fancying I saw you running away through the mountains with all those men trying to catch you.”
“So you didn't—really blame me?” Paul faltered. “You didn't think me so very, very bad?”
“No, I think I made a sort of martyr of you,” Ethel confessed. “I knew you did it impulsively, highly wrought up as you were over your poor father's death. You can't imagine how I worried the first few days after—after you left. You see, no one knew whether Jeff Warren would live or not. Oh, I was happy, Paul, when the doctor declared he was out of danger! I would have given a great deal then to have known how to reach you, but—but no one knew. Then, somehow, as the years passed, the impression got out that you were dead. Everybody seemed to believe it except old Mr. Tye, the shoemaker.”
“My faithful old friend!” Paul said. “He was constantly giving me good advice which I refused to take.”
“I sometimes go into his shop and sit and talk to him,” Ethel continued. “He is a queer old man, more like a saint than an ordinary human being. He declares he is in actual communion with God—says he has visions of things not seen by ordinary sight. He told me once, not long ago, that you were safe and well, and that you would come home again, and be happier than you ever were before. I remember I tried to hope that he knew. How strange that he guessed aright!”
“I understand him now better than I did when I was here,” Paul returned. “I didn't know it then, but I now believe such men as he are spiritually wiser than all the astute materialists the world has produced. What they know they get by intuition, and that comes from the very fountain of infinite wisdom to the humble perhaps more than to the high and mighty.”
“I am very happy to see you again,” Ethel declared, a shadow crossing her face; “but, Paul, you find me—you happen to find me in really great trouble.”
“You!” he cried. “Why?”