Part 27

She glanced up at him with a mournful smile, and taking the knitting which had lain forgotten in her lap leaned over again and measured the stitches upon his wrist.

"When do you start?" she asked, seeing a terrible trouble gathering in his face and resolved to draw his thoughts to other things.

"Next week."

The knitting fell again.

"And you have allowed all this time to go by without coming to see us! You are to come everyday till you go: promise!"

He had been repeating that he would not trust himself to come at all again, except to say good-bye.

"I can't promise that."

"But we want you so much! The major wants you, I want you more than the major. Why should meeting Amy be so hard? Remember how long it will be before you get back. When will you be back?"

He was thinking it were better never.

"It is uncertain," he said.

"I shall begin to look for you as soon as you are gone. I can hear your horse's feet now, rustling in the leaves of October. But what will become of me till then? Ah, you don't begin to realize how much you are to me!"

"Oh!"

He stretched his arms out into vacancy and folded them again quickly.

"I'd better go."

He stood up and walked several paces into the garden, where he feigned to be looking at the work she had left. Was he to break down now? Was the strength which he had relied on in so many temptations to fail him now, when his need was sorest?

In a few minutes he wheeled round to the bench and stopped full before her, no longer avoiding her eyes. She had taken up the book which he had laid on his end of the seat and was turning the pages.

"Have you read it?"

"Over and over."

"Ah! I knew I could trust you! You never disappoint. Sit down a little while."

"I'd--better go!"

"And haven't you a word? Bring this book back to me in silence? After all I said to you? I want to know how you feel about it--all your thoughts."

She looked up at him with a reproachful smile--

The blood had rushed guiltily into his face, and she seeing this, without knowing what it meant, the blood rushed into hers.

"I don't understand," she said proudly and coldly, dropping her eyes and dropping her head a little forward before him, and soon becoming very pale, as from a death-wound.

He stood before her, trembling, trying to speak, trying not to speak. Then he turned and strode rapidly away.

XVIII

THE next morning the parson was standing before his scant congregation of Episcopalians.

It was the first body of these worshippers gathered together in the wilderness mainly from the seaboard aristocracy of the Church of England. A small frame building on the northern slope of the wide valley served them for a meeting-house. No mystical half-lights there but the mystical half-lights of Faith; no windows but the many-hued windows of Hope; no arches but the vault of Love. What more did those men and women need in that land, over-shadowed always by the horror of quick or waiting death?