"You know, then!" he gasped. "You've found out. They have traced me down. It was the name. If I had changed that I might have had a chance. It got into the papers, I see, and the news of my capture spread to the North. Well, well, you see now who you have been sheltering."
It was Mary's turn to misunderstand. Wiping the glad tears from her eyes, she faced him. She put her hand on his arm again.
"There is a great surprise waiting for you at the house," she said. "Who do you think is there to see you? Who, Charlie, who?"
He stared dumbly, his mouth falling open in limp despair.
"I promised that I wouldn't tell you," Mary went on, "so that you would be surprised suddenly, but you look so—so—You don't seem to understand that all your trouble and mine is over. Charlie, it is Celeste."
"Celeste!" he gasped. "Celeste!"
"Yes, and she has told us everything. Your brother has been ill and has confessed the truth. The blame rests where it should at last, and you are free. Oh, Charlie, you are the noblest, best man in all the world, and when I think of what you have borne and your reason for it I feel like falling at your feet in worship. Oh, tell me—tell me—can you really love me? Since I've heard your story I've been afraid that you—that such a man as you—could not really care for a simple country girl like I am. It worried me all the way home. While Celeste was talking it fairly grappled my heart and crushed it. When you and I were both in trouble it somehow seemed possible, but now—" Her voice broke. Quickly Charles stepped forward and took her into his arms. He was quivering in every limb and muscle. Every nerve in his being was strung taut to the music of ecstasy inexpressible.
The clanging of Aunt Zilla's supper-bell awoke them both to the world about them, and arm in arm they went homeward. Celeste was in the parlor, waiting for him, and he went in to her alone. How sad, how changed she looked in the lamplight, how like some consecrated nun contrasted to her former girlish self! As he kissed her and held her thin hands in his calloused grasp he wondered at the lines and shadows in the features which had once been so smooth and free from care. For the first time that day she allowed her emotions to get the better of her. She tried to speak and failed. Suddenly she seemed to him to be a homeless, deserted human waif, and then he comprehended all. The man recuperating in the hospital, though mentally sound, could never be the ideal she had so long striven to make of him. For the second time William had tried to desert her and his child. He was weak; he was a coward; but he was the father of her child, and perhaps ideals were, after all, not to be met in substance. And yet there were strong men in the world, for the man standing before her in the soiled garb of a voluntary outcast possessed the missing requirements. Celeste was happy for him and unhappy for herself. She calmed herself and hurriedly told him the chief things that had taken place in Boston.
"Uncle feels very sorry for his unjust thoughts about you," she said. "All his family pride has centered around you. He is sorry for William, and is not unkind to him, but you are all he talks about now. He is coming down to see you as soon as I get back. I don't know that I have a right to mention it, but I shall, anyway. He has made a will, Charlie, dividing all his fortune between you and Ruth. You are rich now, and are bound to be happy. Mary is a gem of a woman who has proved her worth and fidelity."
She seemed slightly faint. She swayed to and fro, and he caught her arm and steadied her. He had never loved her so much as now. How lonely and bereft she seemed, how frail, how persistently selfless!