Martin had guided his horse round the triangle of sweet-williams and, still torn by conflicting emotions of ecstasy and self-reproach, was proceeding down the driveway when a cry of distress reached his ear:

“Martin—Mr. Howe!”

He turned to see Lucy Webster beckoning frantically to him from the door.

“Come back, please,” she cried. “Hurry!”

That she was excited was evident. Indeed she must have been quite out of her mind to have called him Martin in that shameless fashion. The fact that the name had slipped so spontaneously from her lips and that she hastened to correct her mistake caused the man to speculate with delight as to whether she was wont to think of him by this familiar cognomen. This thought, however, was of minor importance, the flash of an instant. What 190 chiefly disturbed Martin was the girl’s agitation.

Bringing his horse to a stop, he sped back to where she was standing, and on reaching her side he was startled to see that the face but a short interval before so radiant had blanched to a deathly pallor.

“My aunt!” she whispered in a frightened tone. “Something terrible has happened to her!”

If Lucy entertained any doubts as to whether he would aid her in the present emergency she had either cast them aside or was determined to ignore such a possibility, for she held the door open with the obvious expectation that he would follow her into the house.

A year ago, a month, nay—a week, he would never have consented to cross the Webster threshold, let alone offer any assistance to its mistress; but the siren who beckoned him on had cast such a potent spell over his will that now without open protest, although with a certain inward compunction, he followed her through the hall into the kitchen.

Upon the floor was stretched Ellen Webster—crumpled, helpless, inert—her eyes closed 191 and her stern face set as in a death mask. How long she had lain there it was impossible to tell. If she had called for succor it had been to empty walls.

As with mingled sensations Martin stood looking down upon her unconscious form, Lucy threw herself upon her knees beside the woman and gently touched her wrists and heart.

“She isn’t dead,” she murmured presently. “She must either have had a fall or some sort of shock. We must get her upstairs and send for a doctor.”

The “we” told Martin that the girl had not even considered the chance of his refusing to come to her assistance.

“Tony is in the village,” she went on, “and I don’t know what I should have done but for you. How fortunate that you were here!”

Was it fortunate? Martin asked himself.

At last the moment for which he had longed and prayed had come,—the moment when the fate of his enemy lay in his hands, and it was within his power to grant or deny succor. There had never been a question in his mind what he would do should this opportunity arise. Had he not declared over and over again that 192 Ellen Webster might die before he would lift a finger to help her? He had meant it too. All the bitterness of his soul had gone into the vow. And now here he was confronted by the very emergency he had craved from Fortune. The woman he hated was at his mercy. What should he do? Should he stand stanchly by his word and let her life go out into the Beyond when he might perhaps stay its flight? Or should he weakly repudiate his word and call her from the borderland to continue to taunt and torment him? If a doctor were not summoned quickly she might die, and her death be upon his soul. Did he wish to stain himself with this crime,—for crime it would be. Was the revenge worth the hours of self-condemnation that might follow? Who was he that he should judge Ellen Webster and cut off her life before its time? Vengeance is mine: I will repay, saith the Lord.

The phrase rang insistently in Martin’s ears. He tried to stifle it—ignore it—but still the assertion continued to repeat itself within his consciousness. Suppose, tempted by his weaker nature and the appealing eyes of Lucy, he were to yield to his better self and adopt a merciful attitude, might not Ellen be restored 193 to health and jeer at him to the end of his days for his magnanimity? Hers was not the creed “If thine enemy hunger.” She would call him coward and accuse him of a feeble, intimidated will. Were the case to be reversed, she would never curb her hatred to prolong his existence; of that he was certain. He could see her now bending over him, her thumb turned down with the majestic fearlessness of a CÆsar. She would term her act justice, and she would carry out the sentence without a tremor.

But now that the same chance had come to him, and he saw the old woman stretched before him, her thin white hair snowy against the wooden flooring, a vague pity stirred in his heart. Death must come to us all sometime; but how tragic to have its approach unheralded, granting not an instant in which to raise a prayer to Heaven. No, he could not let his worst foe go down to the grave thus. He was the captain of his own soul, but not of Ellen Webster’s.

He glanced up to find Lucy’s gaze fixed upon him. There was horror and anguish in her eyes, and he realized that she had read aright the temptation that assailed him. She did not speak, she seemed scarcely to breathe: 194 but the pleading face told him that should he yield to his darker passions and show no pity, she would forever loathe him for his cruelty. Plainly as he saw this, however, it was not to her silent entreaty that he surrendered. Something deeper than love was calling him.

“Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels and have not charity——” How persistently the sentences came to him! They seemed to echo from out his memory—in his mother’s voice—the voice of a vanished past. She had taught him the words when he was a boy, and he had not thought of them since. Why did they now surge into his mind to weaken his resolve and cause him to waver in his intention? He wished he could get away from Lucy’s eyes and the sight of the woman upon the floor. Had his mother lived, she might sometime have been as frail as this and had hair as white. A sob broke from him, and he stooped over his fallen foe.

“Where do you want I should carry her?” he asked, raising the limp body in his arms.

Lucy did not answer at once, and when she did her reply was unsteady. 195

“The room is at the head of the stairs,” she said, struggling to speak in her customary tone. “Maybe I’d better go first.”

The hushed intimacy of the tragedy suddenly brought the man and the woman very close together.

She led the way and he followed with his helpless burden. The form he bore was not heavy. In fact, it was so fragile that it seemed impossible that it could harbor so much venom and hatred.

Ellen Webster was, after all, nothing but an old, old woman. Perhaps, he reflected, in a wave of regret, he should have realized this and made allowance for it. Then a reaction from his tense emotion swept over him, and he thought with amusement how angry she would be should she suddenly regain consciousness and find herself within his grasp.

But she did not come to herself, and when he laid her on the bed that Lucy had prepared, she was still as unmindful of his touch as she would have been had the spirit within her really taken flight.

Martin did not linger now. His decision was made.

“I’ll step over home an’ get the other horse 196 an’ team, an’ fetch the doctor back,” he said quietly.

“I wish you would.”

She did not thank him, accepting the favor with the simplicity of a weaker nature that leans unabashed on a stronger. Her dependence and her confession of it thrilled him with pleasure. She heard him creep cautiously down over the stairs and go out at the side door.

Then she turned her attention to making more comfortable the helpless woman upon the bed. When at length there was nothing more she could do, she sat down to wait the doctor’s coming. The time dragged on. It seemed an eternity before help came.

In the meantime Ellen lay immovable as she had done from the first, her hard, sharp-cut features harder and more sharply defined in their pallor than the girl had realized them to be. In the furrowed brow, the deep-set eyes, the pitiless mouth there was not one gentle line which death could borrow to soften the stamp with which revenge and bitterness had branded her. So she would look in her coffin, Lucy thought with awe. Majesty might come into her face in the last great moment; 197 but it would be the majesty of hate, not of love.

What a sad, sad ending to a life!

As the girl sat thinking of the friendless, isolated existence of the woman before her, she wondered idly what her aunt would have been, if, while her nature was still plastic, she had married and sacrificed her ego in years of service for others. Ah, she would never then have come to this lonely, embittered old age! Children would have prattled at her knee, and their children would have made glad the silent house. How full of joy and opportunity such an existence would have been!

But these blessings, alas, had not been granted Ellen. Perhaps it had been her own fault. She may deliberately have thrust the gentle visitant, Love, from her dwelling, and once repulsed he may never have sought again for entrance.

Or it might be the woman was one at whose door the god had never knocked. Oh, the pity of it!

For after all did life hold any gift so rare, so supreme, as the perfect devotion of a man and woman who loved one another. It must 198 be a wonderful thing, that divine miracle of Love.

Dreamily Lucy’s gaze wandered off to the sunny fields, and with solemn realization it came to her that should Ellen die, they and all the Webster lands would be hers, to do with as she pleased. There were so many things she had been powerless to get her aunt to do. The house needed repairs if it were to be preserved for coming generations: certain patches of soil had been worked too long and should be allowed to lie fallow; there were scores of other improvements she would like to see carried out. Now she would be free to better the property as she saw fit. She would talk with Martin Howe about it. He was brimming with all the latest farming methods. She would get him to buy her a cultivator such as he used in his own garden, and a wheel-hoe. He could advise her, too, about plowing buckwheat into the soil. And Martin would know what to do about shingling the barn and cementing the cellar.

In fact, it was amazing to discover how inseparable Martin seemed to be from her plans. He was so strong, so wise, just the type of man a woman could depend upon for sympathy and 199 guidance. Absently she twisted the ring on her finger.

Her mind had traveled to the events of the morning, to his battle with himself and final victory. How appealing had been his surrender! The stern personality had melted into a tenderness as winning as a child’s.

If he loved a woman and she loved him—— She started guiltily to find Ellen staring at her with vague, troubled eyes.

“Where—where—am—I—?” asked the woman in a weak, quavering voice.

“Upstairs in your own room, Aunt Ellen,” replied Lucy gently.

“How’d I come here?”

“You didn’t feel very well.”

“Yes. I remember now. I fell, didn’t I?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“I was fussin’ at somethin’, an’ it made me dizzy. ’Twas the heat, I guess. Where’d you find me?”

“In the kitchen.”

“An’ you managed to bring me here?”

Her niece hesitated.

“Yes,” she answered firmly.

Ellen paused and with dread the girl awaited her next question. But no question came. 200 Either the clouded mind was in too vague a mood to grasp details, or the invalid did not care. She seemed to be thinking.

“So I fell,” she repeated at last.

“Yes.”

Again there was a pause, and during the stillness Lucy plainly heard the sound of approaching wagon wheels. It must be Martin with the doctor. She rose softly.

“Where you goin’?” demanded her aunt.

“Just downstairs a minute. I think the doctor——”

“You didn’t send Tony for the doctor!” the invalid exclaimed, a feeble querulousness vibrating in the words.

“Yes; I didn’t know what else to do.”

“He can’t help any.”

“Perhaps he can.”

“I tell you he can’t,” snapped Ellen. “I know well enough what’s the matter with me without bein’ told. I’ve had a shock. My feet are all cold and numb: I can’t feel nothin’ in ’em, nor move ’em. There ain’t no remedy for that. You’re only wastin’ money gettin’ the man here to tell me what I already know. I shan’t see him.”

Lucy waited a moment. 201

“I’m sorry I sent for him if you don’t want him,” she said. “But now that he is here, don’t you think he’d better come up? We don’t need to have him come again.”

Ellen did not respond at once. Then with more animation than she had exhibited, she said:

“I s’pose we’ll have to pay him whether he comes up or not, so I may’s well get my money’s worth out of him. Go and fetch him. He’ll likely be tickled to death to see with his own eyes how bad off I am so’st he can go back an’ blab the news in the village. Folks will be thankful to have something new to talk about.”

Lucy could not but smile at the characteristic remark. She went out and soon returned with Doctor Marsh tiptoeing gingerly behind her.

He was a heavy, florid man whom the combination of heat and speed had transformed into a panting mechanism. Mopping the beads of perspiration from his brow, he started to seat himself at Ellen’s bedside, but the woman waved him off.

“Don’t come any nearer,” she called, “and don’t bring that bag of pills and plasters in here, either. I shan’t need nothin’ you’ve got. 202 I know that well’s you do; an’ I know better’n you do that there ain’t no help for me. You needn’t stay, an’ you needn’t come in. Good mornin’.”

Having delivered herself of this ultimatum at a single breath, Ellen turned her head and closed her eyes.

The doctor looked at her in astonishment but did not move.

“Clip right along home,” reiterated the sick woman without looking at the physician. “My niece’ll pay you as you go out. I reckon you won’t charge more’n half price, since you ain’t done nothin’.”

“I usually have——”

“Mebbe. But this call ain’t like your usual ones, is it?”

“No,” responded the doctor with dignity, “I can’t say that it is.”

“Then you can’t expect to get so much for it,” piped Ellen triumphantly. “My niece will settle with you. Give him a dollar, Lucy—not a cent more. He’ll have fun enough gossipin’ about me to make up the rest of the fee.”

Doctor Marsh, his face a study in outraged decorum, stalked indignantly from the room. 203 Ellen, peeping from beneath her lids, watched him with satisfaction.

“Has he gone?” she demanded, when Lucy returned.

“Yes.”

“Thank the Lord. The fool doesn’t know anything, anyway. Now you go back downstairs an’ finish up your work. There ain’t no call for you to be idlin’ the day out, even if I am.”

“I don’t like to leave you alone.”

“Pooh, pooh! I can’t no more’n die, an’ if I was to start doin’ that you couldn’t stop me.”

Lucy moved toward the door; then turning she remarked gently:

“I’m so sorry, Aunt Ellen.”

“Eh?”

“I’m sorry you’re ill.”

“Are you?” questioned the old woman, searching the girl’s face with her small, flinty eyes. “Mebbe you are. You generally tell the truth. I guess if you do feel so, you’re the only one; an’ I don’t quite see how even you can be.”

“I am.”

Her aunt fingered the sheet nervously.

“You’re a good girl, Lucy,” she presently 204 observed in a weary tone. “You won’t lose nothin’ by it, neither.”

Embarrassed, her niece started from the room.

“Come back here a minute,” muttered the woman drowsily. “I want to speak to you.”

Lucy recrossed the threshold and bent over Ellen, who had sunk back on the pillows and was beckoning to her with a feeble, exhausted hand.

“You’ll stay by me, won’t you?” she pleaded in a whisper, for the first time displaying a consciousness of her helpless, dependent condition. “Promise you won’t desert me. I’m leavin’ you the place an’ ten thousand dollars.”