It was five days before Christmas when Charity, having finished her daily tasks, stole away to spend the last hour or two of the short winter afternoon in her favorite walk, an old logging-path through the pine woods. The air was deliciously clear and sweet. Overhead, a flock of chickadees called to her merrily, and hung upside down among the tasseled boughs in search of insects and other small bird food. Not an anxious search, by any means; rather a contented one, on the whole, as if they were quite sure their daily bread had been given them, and they were only to see that it was not wasted. Charity half unconsciously took note of their happy little movements to and fro, as, for the hundredth time, she went over and over the arguments against forgiving Tom. She had just reached the triumphant “lastly,” in her course of reasoning, when, suddenly startled by the breaking of a twig, she glanced up, to see the subject of her syllogisms not twenty feet away, gathering evergreen. Like the rushing waters of a great tide, sweeping away her artificial landmarks and barriers, came the overwhelming conviction that it was she, and not the man before her, who needed forgiveness.
At the sound of her dress, Tom, too, had started up, as he did in the cell a year ago; but presently went on with his task, stooping low over a refractory vine of princess pine.
“It was the least I could do,” he said humbly, and with evident effort. “I shall take it up to the city myself and sell it for the girls.”
Something in her very silence, or perhaps a slight exclamation that escaped her lips, made him look up. She stood there, alternately paling and flushing, with a look in her eyes he had not seen for many a long day. He sprang to his feet, but she put out her hand to check him.
“Tom,” she began, with quivering lip, “dear Tom, can you forgive”—
What was the use of her hand then! If she had been surrounded by Napoleon’s Old Guard I believe Tom would have got at her somehow. Forgive her! Bless you, if you had seen him for the next five minutes, or had heard them talk as they walked home together beneath the pines, you would have been puzzled to know which forgave or which was forgiven, or which had done right or wrong, or whether either had ever doubted the other for an instant of their lives.
“‘Suffereth long and is kind,’” whispered grandmother that night, stroking the girl’s brown hair.
Of course Tom went home with her afterward, in the old way, and made footprints again before her door, while the moon smiled to itself and poured down its silvery blessing upon them.