Chapter VI: Part III: A Return (2)

“Oh, do not malign my eyes,” laughed the stranger. “They are faded I know and one lid has got a way of drooping of late years, which has greatly altered my expression. But they are the same eyes, doctor, that watched with you beside the bed of Huldah Earle and if they fail to meet you with just the same mixture of trembling hope and fear as they did then it is because youthful passions die out with the years and I no longer greatly care for any verdict you may have to give.”

A frown hard to fathom corrugated the doctor’s forehead and he continued to survey in silence the bold face that declined to blench before him.

“So you persist—” he remarked at length. “Then you are a villain as well as an impostor.”

“Villain or impostor, I am at least Ephraim Earle,” asserted the other; adding as he noted the doctor’s fingers tighten on the slight stick he carried, “Oh, you need not show your hatred quite so plainly, Dr. Izard. I do not hate you, whatever cause I may have to do so. Have I not said that my old passions are dried up, and even signified that my coming back was but a whim? _Curraghven-hoodah_, Oswald, you weary me with your egotism. Let us shake hands and be comrades once more.”

The audacity, the superiority even, with which these words were said, together with the cabalistic phrase he used—a phrase which Dr. Izard was ready to swear even at that moment of shock and confusion, was one known only to himself and Polly’s father,—had such an effect upon him that he reeled and surveyed the speaker with something of superstitious fear and horror. But at the malicious gleam which this momentary weakness called up in the eye of his antagonist, he again regained his self-command, and stepping firmly up to him, he vociferated with stern emphasis:

“I repeat that you are an impostor. I do not know you, nor do I know your name. You say you are Ephraim Earle, but that is a lie. I knew that man too well to be deceived by you. You have neither his eyes, his mouth, nor his voice, I will say nothing of his manners.”

“Oh,” spoke up a voice from behind, “he looks like Ephraim Earle. You cannot say he does not look like Ephraim Earle.”

The doctor turned sharply, but his antagonist, who neither seemed to ask nor need the support of any one or anything but his own audacity, responded with a mocking leer:

“No matter what I look like. He says he cannot be deceived by my eyes, my mouth, or my voice. That is good. That sounds like a man who is sure of himself. But friends—” Here his voice rose and the menace which he had hitherto held in abeyance became visible in his sharpened glance—“he can be deceived by his own prejudices. Dr. Izard does not want to know me because he was Huldah Earle’s attending physician, and her death, as you all know, was very sudden and _very peculiar_.”

Venomous as the insinuation was, it was a master-stroke and won for its audacious author the cause for which he had been battling. The doctor, who had worked himself up into a white heat, flushed as if a blood-vessel was about to burst in his brain, and drawing back, stepped slowly from before the other’s steady and openly triumphant gaze. Not till he reached the outskirts of the crowd, did he recover himself, and then he halted only long enough to cry to the jostling and confused crowd he had just left:

“He looks like a tramp and he talks like a villain. Be careful what credit you give him, and above all, _look after Polly Earle_.”

------------------------------------------------------------------------

XII.

AT HOME.

IT was now nearing eight o’clock, and as Dr. Izard strode on through the village streets, seeing no one and hearing no one, though more than one person respectfully accosted him, the twilight deepened so rapidly that it was quite dark when he passed the church and turned up the highroad to his own house.

It was dark and it was chilly, else why should so strong a man as he shiver? So dark that the monuments over the wall were hardly to be discerned, and he had to fumble for the gate he usually found without trouble. Yet when his hand finally fell upon it and he mechanically lifted the latch he did not pass through at once but lingered, almost with a coward’s hesitation, finding difficulty, as it seemed, in traversing the dismal path before him to the no less dismal door beyond and the solitude that there awaited him.

But he passed the gate at last, and groped his way along the path towards his home, though with lingering footsteps and frequent pauses. Dread was in his every movement, and when he stopped it was to clutch the wall at his side with one hand and to push the other out before him as though to ward off some threatening danger, or avert some expected advance. In this attitude he would become rigidly still, and several minutes would elapse before he stumbled on again. Finally he reached his door, and unlocking it with difficulty threw himself into the house, shuddering and uttering an involuntary cry as a spray of the swaying vine clung to him.

Ashamed of his weakness, for he presently saw what had caught him by the arm, he drew a deep breath, and tried to shut the door. But it would not close. Some obstruction, a trivial one no doubt, had interposed to stop it, and he being in an excited state pushed at it with looks of horror, till his strength conquered and he both shut and locked the door.

He was trembling all over when he had accomplished this, and groping for a chair he sat down in it, panting. But no sooner had he taken his seat than the dim panes of the window struck his sight, and bounding to his feet he drew down the shade as if he would shut out the whole world from his view, and the burying-yard first of all.

Quite isolated now and in utter darkness, he stood for a few minutes deeply breathing and cursing his own fears and pusillanimity. Then he struck a light, and calmed by the sight of the familiar interior, sat down at his desk and tried to think. But though he was a man of great intellectual powers, he seemed to find it difficult to fix his thoughts or even to remain quiet. Involuntary shudders shook his frame, and from time to time his eye glanced fearfully towards the door as if he dreaded to see it open and admit some ghostly visitor.

Suddenly he leaped to his feet, went to a mirror and surveyed himself. Evidently the result was not encouraging for he uttered an exclamation of dismay and coming back to the desk, took up a book and tried to read. But the attempt was futile. With a low cry he flung the book aside, and rising to his feet began to talk, uttering low and fearful words from which he seemed himself to recoil without possessing the power of stopping them. The name of Ephraim Earle mingled often with these words, and always with that new short laugh of his so horrible to hear. And once he spoke another name, but it was said so softly that only from the tears which gushed impetuously from his eyes, could it be seen that it stirred the deepest chords of his nature.

The clock, which lagged sorely that night, struck eleven at last, and the sound seemed to rouse him, for he glanced toward his bed. But it was only to cry “Impossible!” and to cast a hunted look about the room which seemed like a prison to him.

At length he grasped the green door and began to pull at its hasps and fastenings. Careless of the result of these efforts he shook a small heathen god from its pedestal so that it fell rattling to the floor and lay in minute pieces at his feet. But he did not heed. Recklessly he pulled open the door, recklessly he passed into the space beyond. But once out of the room, once in another atmosphere than that peopled by his imagination, he seemed to grow calmer, and after a short survey of the narrow hall in which he found himself and a glance up the tiny, spiral staircase rising at his right, he stepped back into the office and took up the lamp. Carrying it with him up the narrow staircase he set it down in the hall above, and without looking to right or left, almost without noting the desolation of those midnight halls, he began pacing the floor back and forth with a restless, uneven tread, far removed from his usual slow and dignified gait.

At early morning he was still pacing there.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

XIII.

A TEST.

“O Clarke, wait: there is the doctor now.” It was Polly who was speaking. She had come as far as the church in her search after Dr. Izard and had just seen him issuing from his own gate.

“He has a bag in his hand; he is going on one of his journeys.”

“No, no,” she protested, “I cannot have it.” And bounding forward she intercepted the doctor, just as he was about to step into his buggy. “O doctor, you are not going away; you are not going to leave me with this dreadful trouble; don’t, don’t, I pray!” The doctor, who in his abstraction had not noted her approach, started at the sound of her voice, and turning showed her a very haggard face.

“Why,” she cried, stepping back, “you are ill yourself.”

“No,” he answered shortly, drawing himself up in his old reserved manner. “I had but little sleep last night, but I am not ill. What do you want, Polly?”

“O don’t you know what I want? You, of all the town, have said he was an impostor! To you then I come as to my only hope; speak, speak, is he not my father?”

The doctor with a side glance at Clarke, who had remained in the background, drew the girl’s hand within his arm and led her a few steps away. But it seemed an involuntary movement on his part, for he presently brought her back within easy earshot of her lover.

“He does not look to me like Ephraim Earle,” he was saying. “He has not his eyes, nor does his voice sound familiar. I do not see why any one acknowledges him.”

“But they can’t help it. He knows everybody, and everything. I—I thought you had some good reason, Dr. Izard, something that would make it easy for me to deny his claims.”

“You—” The doctor’s sleepless night seemed to have had a strange effect upon him, for he stammered in speaking, he who was always so cold and precise. “You thought—” he began, but presently broke into that new, strange laugh of his, and urging Polly towards her lover, he addressed his questions to the latter. “Does this man,” he asked, “make a serious claim upon the Earle name and its rights?”

Clarke, who was always sensible when in Dr. Izard’s presence of something intangible but positive acting like a barrier between them and yet who strangely revered the doctor, summoned up his courage and responded with the respect he really felt.

“Yes,” said he; but with a certain reserve, “that is our best reason perhaps for believing him. He promises not to molest Polly, nor to make any demands upon her until she herself recognizes her duty.”

The frown which darkened the doctor’s face deepened.

“He is a deep one, then,” said he, and stood for a moment silent.

“If he is an impostor, yes,” assented Clarke; “but Lawyer Crouse, who talked with him half an hour last night, accepted him at once, and so did Mr. Sutherland.” Mr. Sutherland was the Baptist minister.

“The fools!” muttered the doctor, as much in anger as amazement; “has the whole town reached its dotage?”

Clarke, who seemed surprised at the doctor’s vehemence, quietly remarked:

“You were Mr. Earle’s best friend. If you say that this man is not he, there would of course be many to listen to you.”

But the doctor, resuming his accustomed expression, refused an answer to this suggestion, at which Polly’s face grew very pale, and she grasped his arm imploringly, saying as she did so:

“I cannot bear this uncertainty, I cannot bear to think there is any question about this matter. If he is my father, I owe him everything; if he is not——”

“Polly,”—The doctor spoke coldly but not unkindly, “marry Clarke, go with him to Cleveland where he has the promise of a fine position, and leave this arrant pretender to settle his rights himself. He will not urge them long when he finds the money gone for which he is striving.”

“You bid me do that? Then you _know_ he is not my father.”

But the doctor instead of answering with the vigorous yes she had expected, looked aside and carelessly murmured:

“I have said that I saw no likeness in him to the man I once knew. Of course my judgment was hurried, our interview was short and I was laboring under the shock of his appearance. But if everybody else in town recognizes him as Ephraim Earle, I must needs think my opinion was warped by my surprise and the indignation I felt at what I considered a gross piece of presumption.”

“Then you do not know,” quoth poor Polly, her head sinking lower and lower on her breast.

“No,” cried the doctor, turning shortly at the word and advancing once more toward the buggy.

But at this move she sprang forward and sought again to detain him.

“But you will not go and leave me in this dreadful uncertainty,” she pleaded. “You will stay and have another talk with this man and satisfy yourself and me that he is indeed my father.”

But the stern line into which the doctor’s lip settled, assured her that in this regard he was not to be moved; and frightened, overawed by the prospect before her, she turned to Clarke and cried:

“Take me home, take me back to your mother; she is the only person who can give me any comfort.”

The doctor who was slowly proceeding to his horse’s head, looked back.

“Then you don’t like my advice,” he smiled.

She stared, remembered what he had said and answered indignantly:

“If this poor, wretched, wicked-eyed man is my father—and I should never have doubted it if you had not declared him an impostor before all the town people—then I would be a coward to desert him and seek my happiness in a place where he could not follow me.”

“Even if he is as wicked as his looks indicate?”

“Yes, yes, even if he is wicked. Who can say what caused that wickedness.”

The doctor, fumbling with the halter, stopped and seemed to muse.

“Did you ever see your father’s picture hanging in the old cottage?”

“Yes, I saw it yesterday.”

“Did that have a wicked look?”

“I do not think it had a good look.” This was said very low but it made the doctor start.

“No?” he exclaimed.

“It made me feel a little unpleasant, as if something I could neither understand nor sympathize with had met me in my father’s smile. It made him more remote, and prepared me for the heartless figure of the man who in the next few minutes claimed me as his daughter.”

“Strange!” issued from the doctor’s lips; and his face, which had been hard to read from the first, became more and more inscrutable.

“My mother, who is as wise as she is gentle, advises Polly to give up the cottage to her father; but not to live in it with him till his character is better understood and his intentions made manifest.”

“Then your mother sees this man in the same light as others do?”

“She certainly considers him to be Ephraim Earle. It is not natural for her to think otherwise under the circumstances.”

“I do indeed stand alone,” quoth the doctor.

“When I told her,” pursued Clarke, “what you had said, she looked amazed but she said nothing to show that she had changed her opinion. I do not think any one was really affected by your words.”

Something in the tone in which this was said showed where Clarke himself stood. A bitter smile crossed the doctor’s lip, and he seemed more than ever anxious to be gone.

“I shall be away,” he said, “several days. When I come back I hope to see this thing settled.”

“I hate him,” burst from Polly’s lips. “I am terrified at my thoughts of him, but in my inner consciousness I know him to be my father, and I shall try and do my duty by him; shall I not, Clarke?”

Clarke, who had felt himself almost unnecessary in this scene, grasped at the opportunity which this appeal gave him and took her tenderly by the arm.

“We will try and do our duty,” he corrected, “praying Providence to help us.”

And the doctor, with a glance at them both, sprang into his buggy and was driving off when he rose and flung back at Polly this final word of paternal advice:

“He is the claimant; you are the one in possession. Let him prove himself to be the man he calls himself.”

Clarke, dropping Polly’s arm, sprang after the doctor.

“Wait! one moment,” he cried. “What do you call proof? You who knew him so well in the past, tell us how to make sure that his pretensions are not false.”

The doctor, drawing up his horse, paused for a moment in deep thought.

“Ask him,” he finally said, “to show you the medal given him by the French government. As it has never been found in his house, and as it was useless to raise money upon, he should, if he is Ephraim Earle, be able to produce it. Till he does, I advise you to cherish doubts in his regard, and above all to keep that innocent and enthusiastic young girl out of his clutches.”

And with a smile which would have taken more than Clarke’s experience with the world to understand, much less to explain, the doctor whipped up his horse and disappeared down the road towards the station.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

XIV.

GRACE.

THE doctor did not return in a few days nor in a few weeks. Two months passed before his gate creaked on its hinges and the word ran through the town, “Dr. Izard is back!”

He arrived in Hamilton at nightfall, and proceeded at once to his office. There was in his manner none of the hesitation shown at his last entrance there, and when by chance he passed the mirror in his quick movements about the room he was pleased himself to note the calmness of his features, and the quiet air of dignified reserve once more pervading his whole appearance.

“I have fought the battle,” he quietly commented to himself; “and now to face the new order of things!”

He looked about the room, put a few matters in order, and then stepped out into the green space before his door. Glancing right and left and seeing nobody in the road or in the fields beyond the cemetery, he walked straight to the monument of Polly’s mother and sternly, determinately surveyed it. Then he glanced down at the grave it shaded, and detecting a stray leaf lying on its turf, he picked it up and cast it aside, with a suggestion of that strange smile which had lately so frequently altered his handsome features. After which he roamed through the churchyard, coming back to his door by another path. The chill of early September had touched many of the trees about, and there was something like dreariness in the landscape. But he did not appear to notice this, and entered in and sat down at his table with his former look of concentration and purpose.

Evening came and with it several patients; some from need, some from curiosity. To both kinds he listened with equal calmness, prescribing for their real or fancied complaints and seeing them at once to the door. At ten o’clock even these failed to put in an appearance, and being tired, he was about to draw his shade and lock his door when there came a low knock at the latter of so timid and so hesitating a character that his countenance changed and he waited for another knock before uttering his well known sharp summons to enter.

It came after a moment’s delay, and from some impulse difficult for himself to explain, he proceeded to the door, and hastily opened it. A tall, heavily veiled figure, clad in widow’s weeds, stood before him, at sight of which he started back, hardly believing his eyes.

“Grace!” he ejaculated; “Grace!” and held out his arms with an involuntary movement of which he seemed next moment ashamed, for with a sudden change of manner he became on the instant ceremonious, and welcoming in his visitor with a low bow, he pushed forward a chair, with mechanical politeness, and stammered with intense emotion:

“You are ill! Or your son! Some trouble threatens you or you would not be here.”

“My son is well, and I—I am as well as usual,” answered the advancing lady, taking the chair he offered her, though not without some hesitation. “Clarke is with the horses in front and I have ventured—at this late hour—to visit you, because I knew you would never come to me, even if I sent for you, Oswald.”

The tone, the attitude, the whole aspect of the sweet yet dignified woman before him, seemed to awaken an almost uncontrollable emotion in the doctor. He leaned toward her and said in tones which seemed to have a corresponding effect upon her: “You mistake, Grace. One word from you would have brought me at any time; that is, if I could have been of any service to you. I have never ceased to love you—” He staggered back but quickly recovered himself—“and never shall.”

“I do not understand you,” protested Mrs. Unwin, half rising. “I did not come—I did not expect—” her agitation prevented her from proceeding.

“I do not understand myself!” exclaimed he, walking a step away. “I never thought to speak such words to you again. Forgive me, Grace; you have a world of wrong to pardon in me; add another mark of forbearance to your list and make me more than ever your debtor.” She drooped her head and sitting down again seemed to be endeavoring to regain her self-possession.

“It was for Clarke,” she murmured, “that I came.”

“I might have known it,” cried the doctor.

“He would not speak for himself, and Polly, the darling child, has become so dazed by the experiences of these last two months that she no longer knows her duty. Besides, she seems afraid to speak to you again; says that you frighten her, and that you no longer love her.”

“I never have loved her,” he muttered, but so low the words were not carried to the other’s ears.

“Have you learned in your absence what has taken place here in Hamilton?” she asked.

Rousing himself, for his thoughts were evidently not on the subject she advanced, he took a seat near her and composed himself to listen, but meeting her soft eyes shining through the heavy crape she wore, he said with a slight appealing gesture:

“Let me see your face, Grace, before I attempt to answer. I have not dared to look upon it for fourteen years, but now, with some of the barriers down which held us inexorably apart, I may surely be given the joy of seeing your features once more, even if they show nothing but distrust and animosity toward me.”

She hesitated, and his face grew pale with the struggle of his feelings, then her slim white hand went up and almost before he could realize it, they sat face to face.

“O Grace,” he murmured; “the same! always the same; the one woman in all the world to me! But I will not distress you. Other griefs lie nearer your heart than any I could hope to summon up, and I do not know as I would have it otherwise if I could. Proceed with your questions. They were in reference to Clarke, I believe.”

“No, I only asked if you had kept yourself acquainted with what has been going on in Hamilton since you left. Did you know that Ephraim Earle was living again in the old house, and that Polly is rapidly losing her fortune owing to his insatiable demands for money?”

“No!” He sprang to his feet and his whole attitude showed distress and anger. “I told her to make the fellow give her a proof, an unmistakable proof, that he was indeed the brilliant inventor of whose fame we have all been proud.”

“And he furnished it, Oswald. You mean the medal which he received from France, do you not? Well, he had it among his treasures in the cave, and he showed it to her one day. It was the one thing, he declared, from which he had never parted in all his adventurous career.”

“You are dreaming! he never had _that_! Could not have had _that_! It was some deception he practised upon you!” exclaimed the doctor, aghast and trembling.

But she shook her lovely head, none the less beautiful because her locks were becoming silvered on the forehead, and answered: “It was the very medal we saw in our youth, with the French arms and inscription upon it. Dr. Sutherland examined it, and Mr. Crouse says he remembers it well. Besides it had his name engraved upon it and the year.”

The doctor, to whom her words seemed to come in a sort of nightmare, sank into his chair and stared upon her with such horror that she would have recoiled from him in dismay had he been any other man than Oswald Izard, so long loved and so long and passionately borne with, notwithstanding his mysterious words and startling inconsistencies of conduct.

“You do not know why this surprises me,” he exclaimed, and hung his head. “I was so sure,” he added below his breath, “that this was some impostor, and not Ephraim Earle.”

“I know,” she proceeded, after a moment, as soon, indeed, as she thought he could understand her words, “that you did not credit his claims and refused to recognize him as Polly’s father. But I had no idea you felt so deeply on the subject or I might have written to you long ago. You have some reasons for your doubts, Oswald; for I see that your convictions are not changed by this discovery. What is it? I am ready to listen if no one else is, for he is blighting Polly’s life and at the same time shattering my son’s hopes.”

“I said—I swore to Polly that I had no reason,” he declared, gloomily dropping his eyes and assuming at once the defensive.

But she with infinite tact and a smile he could not but meet, answered softly: “I know that too; but I am better acquainted with you than she is, and I am confident that you have had some cause for keeping the truth from Polly, which will not apply to me. Is there not something connected with those old days—something, perhaps, known only to you, which would explain your horror of this man’s pretensions and help her possibly out of her dilemma? Are you afraid to confide it to me, when perhaps in doing so you would make two innocent ones happy?”

“I cannot talk about it,” he replied with almost fierce emphasis. “Ephraim Earle and I—” He started, caught her by the arm and turned his white face toward the door. “Hush!” he whispered, and stooped his ear to listen. She watched him with terror and amazement, but he soon settled back, and waving his hand remarked quietly:

“The boughs are losing their leaves and the vines sometimes tap against the windows like human fingers. You were saying——”

“_You_ were saying that Ephraim Earle and you——”

But his blank looks showed that he had neither understood nor followed her. “Were you not good friends?” she asked.

“Oh, yes, oh, yes,” he answered hastily; “too good friends for me to be mistaken now.”

“Then it is from his looks alone that you conclude him to be an impostor?”

The doctor did not respond, and she, seeming quite helpless to move, sat for a minute silently contemplating his averted face.

“I know you did not talk with him long. Nor have I attempted to do so, yet in spite of everybody’s opinion but your own I have come to the same conclusion as yourself, that he is not Polly’s father.”

The doctor’s lips moved, but no words issued from them.

“That is why I press the matter; that is why I am here to pray and entreat you to save Polly and to save my son. _Prove this man a villain_, and force him to loose his hold upon the Earle estate before Polly’s money is all gone!”

“Is it then a question of money?” asked the doctor. “Two months have passed and you are afraid that he will dispose of twenty thousand dollars!”

“He has already disposed of ten of them and the rest——”

“Disposed of ten thousand dollars!”

“Yes, for old gambling debts, pressing matters which Polly could not let stand without shame.”

“The wretch!” leapt from the doctor’s lips. “Was there no one to advise her, to forbid——”

“You were gone and Clarke was afraid of seeming mercenary. I think the girl’s secret terror of her father and her lack of filial affection drove her to yield so readily to his demands for money.”

An inarticulate word was the doctor’s sole reply.

“And that is not the whole. Clarke’s career is endangered and the prospect of his carrying out his plans almost gone. Mr. Earle—I have called him so—does not hesitate to say that he must have five thousand dollars more by next October. If Polly accedes to this demand, and I do not think we can influence her to refuse him, Clarke will have to forego all hopes of becoming a member of the Cleveland firm, for he will never take her last five thousand, even if she urges him to it on her knees.”

“It is abominable, unprecedented!” fumed the doctor, rising and pacing the room. “But I can do nothing, prove nothing. He has been received as Ephraim Earle, and is too strongly intrenched in his position for me to drive him out.”

The absolutism with which this was said made his words final; and she slowly rose.

“And so I too have failed,” she cried; but seeing his face and noting the yearning look with which he regarded her, she summoned up her courage afresh and finally said: “They have told me—I have heard—that this man made some strange threats to you in parting. Is that the reason why you do not like to interfere or to proclaim more widely your opinion of him?”

The doctor smiled, but there was no answer in the smile and she went vehemently on: “Such threats, Oswald, are futile. No one less sensitive than you would heed them for a moment. You are above any one’s aspersion, even on an old charge like that.”

“Men will believe anything,” he muttered.

“But men will not believe that. Do we not all know how faithfully you attended Mrs. Earle in her last illness, and how much skill you displayed? I remember it well, if the rest of the community do not, and I say you need not fear anything this man can bring up against you. His influence in town does not go so far as that.”

But the doctor with unrelieved sadness answered with decision, “I cannot make this man my enemy; he has too venomous a tongue.” And she watching him knew that Polly’s doom was fixed and her son’s also, and began slowly to draw down her veil.

But he, noticing this action, though he had seemed to be blind to many others she had made, turned upon her with such an entreating look that she faltered and let her hand fall in deep emotion.

“Grace,” he pleaded, “Grace, I cannot let you go without one kindly word to make the solitude which must settle upon this room after your departure, less unendurable. You distrust me.”

“Does this visit here look like distrust?” she gently asked.

“And you hate me! But——”

“Do I look as if I hated you?” she again interposed, this time with the look of an angel in her sad but beautiful eyes.

“Ah, Grace,” he cried, with the passion of a dozen years let loose in one uncontrollable flood, “you cannot love me, not after all these years. When we parted——”

“At whose instigation, Oswald?”

“At mine, at mine, I know it. Do not reproach me with that, for I could not have done differently.—I thought, I dreamed that it was with almost as much pain on your side as mine. But you married, Grace, married very soon.”

“Still at whose instigation?”

“Again at mine. I dared not keep you from any comfort which life might have in store for you, and the years which you have spent in happiness and honor must have obliterated some of the traces of that love which bound our lives together fifteen years ago.”

“Oswald, Mr. Unwin was a good husband and Clarke has always been like an own son to me, but——”

“Oh,” interposed the doctor, starting back before the beauty of her face, “don’t tell me that a woman’s heart can, like a man’s, be the secret sepulchre of a living passion for fifteen years. I could not bear to know that! The struggle which I waged fourteen years ago I have not strength to wage now. No! no! woman of my dreams, of my heart’s dearest emotion, loved once, loved now, loved always! tell me anything but _that_,—tell me even that you hate me.”

Her eyes, which had fallen before his, swam suddenly with tears and she started as if for protection toward the door.

“Oh, I must go,” she cried. “Clarke is waiting; it is not wise; it is not seemly for me to be here.” But the doctor, into whom a fiery glow had entered, was beside her before she could reach the threshold. “No, no,” he pleaded, “not till you have uttered one word, one whisper of the old story; one assurance—Ah, now I am entreating for the very thing, the existence of which, I deprecated a few minutes ago! It shows how unbalanced I am. Yes, yes, you can go; but, Grace, if you have ever doubted that I loved you, listen to this one confession. Ever since the day we parted, necessarily parted, fourteen years ago, I have never let a week go by till these last few ones during which I have been away from Hamilton, that I have not given up two nights a week to thinking of you and watching you.”

“Watching me!”

“Twice a week for fourteen years have I sat for an hour in Mrs. Fanning’s west window that overlooks your gardens. Thence, unnoted by everybody, I have noted you, if by happy chance you walked in the garden; and if you did not, noted the house that held you and the man who sheltered your youth.”

“Oswald,”—she felt impelled to speak, “if—if you loved me like this, why did you send me that cruel letter two days after our engagement? Why did you bid me forget you and marry some one else, if you had not forgotten me and did not wish me to release you in order that you might satisfy your own wishes in another direction?”

“Grace, if I could explain myself now I could have explained myself then. Fate, which is oftenest cruel to the most loving and passionate hearts, has denied me the privilege of marriage, and when I found it out——”

“True, you have never married. Cruel, cruel one! Why did you not let me know that you would always live single for my sake; it would have made it possible for me to have lived single for yours.”

The doctor with the love of a lifetime burning in his eyes, shook his head at this, and answered: “That would have shown me to be a selfish egotist, and I did not want to be other than generous to you. No, Grace, all was done for the best; and this is for the best, this greeting and this second parting. The love which we have acknowledged to-night will be a help and not a hindrance to us both. But we will meet again, not very soon, for I cannot trust a strength which has yielded so completely at your first smile.”

“Farewell, then, Oswald,” she murmured. “It has taken the sting from my heart to know that you did not leave me from choice.”

And he, striving to speak, broke down, and it was she who had to show her strength by gently leaving him and finding her own way to the door.

But no sooner had the night blast blowing in from the graveyard struck him, than he stumbled in haste to the threshold, and drawing her with a frenzied grasp from the path she was blindly taking toward the graves, led her from that path to the high road, where Clarke was waiting in some anxiety for the end of this lengthy interview. As the doctor gave her up and saw her taken in charge by her son, he said with a thrilling emphasis not soon to be forgotten by either of the two who listened to them:

“Try every means, and be sure you bid Polly to try every means, to rid yourselves of the bondage of this interloper. If all fails, come to me. But do not come till every other hope is dead.”