Lemuel made what answer he could. There was happiness enough in merely being with her to have counterbalanced all the pain he was suffering; and when she made him partner of her interests and associations, and appealed to their common memories in confidence of his sympathy, his heavy heart stirred with strange joy. He had supposed that Berry must have warned her against him; but she was treating him as if he had not. Perhaps he had not, and perhaps he had done so, and this was her way of showing that she did not believe it. He tried to think so; he knew it was a subterfuge, but he lingered in it with a fleeting, fearful pleasure. They had crossed from the Common and were walking up under the lindens of Chestnut Street, and from time to time they stopped, in the earnestness of their parley, and stood talking, and then loitered on again in the summer security from oversight which they were too rapt to recognise. They reached the top of the hill, and came to a door where she stopped. He fell back a pace. “Good-bye—” It was eternal loss, but it was escape.
She smiled in timorous hesitation. “Won't you come in? And I will get Mr. Berry's letter.”
She opened the door with a latch-key, and he followed her within; a servant-girl came half-way up the basement stairs to see who it was, and then went down. She left him in the dim parlour a moment, while she went to get the letter. When she returned, “I have a little room for my work at the top of the house,” she said, “but it will never be like the St. Albans. There's no one else here yet, and it's pretty lonesome—without Madeline.”
She sank into a chair, but he remained standing, and seemed not to heed her when she asked him to sit down. He put Berry's letter into his pocket without looking at it, and she rose again.
She must have thought he was going, and she said with a smile of gentle trust, “It's been like having last winter back again to see you. We thought you must have gone home right after the fire; we didn't see anything of you again. We went ourselves in about a week.”
Then she did not know, and he must tell her himself.
“Did Mr. Berry say anything about me—at the fire—that last day?” he began bluntly.
“No!” she said, looking at him with surprise; there was a new sound in his voice. “He had no need to say anything! I wanted to tell you—to write and tell you—how much I honoured you for it—how ashamed I was for misunderstanding you just before, when—”
He knew that she meant when they all pitied him for a coward.
Her voice trembled; he could tell that the tears were in her eyes. He tried to put the sweetness of her praise from him. “Oh, it wasn't that that I meant,” he groaned; and he wrenched the words out. “That fellow, who said he was a friend of mine, and got into the house that way, was a thief; and Mr. Berry caught him robbing his room the day of the fire, and treated me as if I knew it and was helping him on—”