"Ah, madam," said Jacob Dolan, as he fumbled in his pockets, and tried to breathe away from her to hide the surcease of his sorrow, "Ah, madam," he repeated, as he suddenly thought to pull off his hat, "I did not come for you—'twas Miss Hendricks I called for; but I have one for you, too. He gave the bundle to me the last thing—poor lad, poor lad." He handed her the letter addressed to Mrs. Brownwell, and then asked, "Is the sister about?"
And when he found she could not be seen he went away, and Molly Brownwell sat by the dead man's body and read:—
"My darling—my darling—they will let a dead man say that to you—won't they? And yet, so far as any thought of mine could sin against you, I have been dead these twenty years. Yet I know that I have loved you all that time, and as I sit alone here in the bank, and take the bridle off my heart, the old throb of joy that we both knew as children comes back again. It is such a strange thing—this life—such a strange thing." Then there followed a burst of passionate regret from the man's very heart, and it is so sacred to a manly love that curbed itself for a score of years, that it must not be set down here.
Over and over Molly Brownwell read the letter and then crept out to her lilac thicket and wept till dawn. She heard Adrian Brownwell go, but she could not face him, and listened as his footsteps died away, and he passed from her life.
And John Barclay kept vigil for the dead with her. As he tossed in his bed through the night, he seemed to see glowing out of the darkness before him the words Hendricks had written, in the letter that Dolan gave Barclay at midnight. Sometimes the farewell came to him:—
"It is not this man of millions that I wish to be with a moment to-night, John—but the boy I knew in the old days—the boy who ran with me through the woods at Wilson's Creek, the boy who rode over the hill into the world with me that September day forty years ago; the boy whose face used to beam eagerly out of yours when you sat playing at your old melodeon. I wish to be near him a little while to-night. When you get this, can't you go to your great organ and play him back into consciousness and tell him Bob says good-by?"
At dawn Barclay called Bemis out of bed, and before sunrise he and Barclay were walking on the terrace in front of the Barclay home.
"Lige," began Barclay, "did you tell Adrian of that note last night?" Bemis grinned his assent.
"And he went home, found Bob there conferring with Mrs. Brownwell about his position in the matter, and Adrian killed him."
"That's the way I figured it out myself," replied Bemis, laconically, "but it's not my business to say so."