PAUL'S first impulse, on finding himself alone, was to walk to Grayson and look up his old friends; but so new and vivifying was his freedom from the cares which had so long haunted him that he wanted to hug the sense of it to himself still longer in solitude. So, leaving the farm-house, he went to the summit of a little wooded hill back of the tannery and sat down in the shade of the trees. In his boundless joy he actually felt imponderable. He had an ethereal sense of being free from his body, of flying in the azure above the earth, floating upon the fleecy clouds. He noticed a windblown drift of fragrant pine-needles in the cleft of a rock close by, and creeping into the cool nook like a beast into its lair, he threw himself down and chuckled and laughed in sheer delight.

Ethel, little Ethel, who had once been his friend—who had prayed for him and wept with him in sorrow—was coming. That very day he was to see her again after all those years; but she would not look the same. She was no longer a child. She had changed as he had changed. Would she know him? Would she even remember him—the gawky farm-hand she had so sweetly befriended? No; it was likely that he and all that pertained to him had passed out of her mind. The memory of her, however, had been his constant companion; her pure, childish faith had been an ultimate factor in his redemption.

The morning hours passed. It was noon, and the climbing sun dropped its direct rays full upon him. He left the rocks and stood out in the open, unbaring his brow to the cooling breeze which swept up from the fields of grain and cotton. His eyes rested on the red road leading to the village. Wagons, pedestrians, droves of sheep and cattle driven by men on horses, were passing back and forth. Suddenly his heart sprang like a startled thing within him. Surely that was Hoag's open carriage, with Cato on the high seat in front. Yes, and of the two ladies who sat behind under sunshades the nearer one was Ethel. Paul turned cold from head to foot, and fell to trembling. How strange to see her, even at that distance, in the actual flesh, when for seven years she had been a dream! A blinding mist fell before his eyes, and when he had brushed it away the carriage had passed out of view behind the intervening trees. In great agitation he paced to and fro. How could he possibly command himself sufficiently to face her in a merely conventional way? He had met women and won their friendship in the West, and had felt at ease in good society. But this was different. Strange to say, he was now unable to see himself as other than the awkward, stammering lad clothed in the rags of the class to which he belonged.

Hardly knowing what step to take, he turned down the incline toward the farm-house, thinking that he might gain his room unseen by the two ladies. At the foot of the hill there was a great, deep spring, and feeling thirsty he paused to bend down and drink from the surface, as he had done when a boy. Drawing himself erect, he was about to go on, when his eye caught a flash of a brown skirt among the drooping willows that bordered the stream, and Ethel came out, her hands full of maiden-hair ferns. At first she did not see him, busy as she was shaking the water from the ferns and arranging them. She wore a big straw hat, a close-fitting shirt-waist, and a neat linen skirt. How much she was changed! She was taller, her glorious hair, if a shade darker, seemed more abundant. She was slender still, and yet there was a certain fullness to her form which added grace and dignity to the picture he had so long treasured. Suddenly, while he stood as if rooted in the ground, she glanced up and saw him.

“Oh!” he heard her ejaculate, and he fancied that her color heightened a trifle. Transferring the ferns to her left hand, she swept toward him as lightly as if borne on a breeze, her right hand held out cordially. “I really wouldn't have known you, Paul,” she smiled, “if Uncle Jim had not told me you were here. Oh, I'm so glad to see you!”

As he held her soft hand it seemed to him that he was drawing self-possession and faith in himself from her ample store of cordiality.

“I would have known you anywhere,” he heard himself saying, quite frankly. “And yet you have changed very, very much.”

Thereupon he lost himself completely in the bewitching spell of her face and eyes. He had thought her beautiful as a little girl, but he had not counted on seeing her like this—on finding himself fairly torn asunder by a force belonging peculiarly to her.

He marveled over his emotions—even feared them, as he stole glances at her long-lashed, dreamy eyes, witnessed the sunrise of delicate embarrassment in her rounded cheeks, and caught the ripened cadences of the voice which had haunted him like music heard in a trance.

“You have changed a great deal,” she was saying, as she led him toward the spring. “A young man changes more when—when there really is something unusual in him. I was only a little girl when I knew you, Paul, but I was sure that you would succeed in the world. At least I counted on it till—”

“Till I acted as I did,” he said, sadly, prompted by her hesitation.

She looked at him directly, though her glance wavered slightly.

“If I lost hope then,” she replied, “it was because I could not look far enough into the future. Surely it has turned out for the best. Uncle told me why you came back. Oh, I think that is wonderful, wonderful! Till now I have never believed such a thing possible of a man, and yet I know it now because—because you did it.”

He avoided her appealing eyes, looking away into the blue, sunlit distance. His lip shook when he answered:

“Some day I'll tell you all about it. I'll unfold it to you like a book, page by page, chapter by chapter. It is a story that opens in the blackness of night and ends in the blaze of a new day.”

“I know what you mean—oh, I know!” Ethel sighed. “The news of that night was my first realization of life's grim cruelty. Somehow I felt— I suppose other imaginative girls are the same way—I felt that it was a sort of personal matter to me because I had met you as I had. I didn't blame you. I couldn't understand it fully, but I felt that it was simply a continuation of your ill-luck. I cried all that night. I could not go to sleep. I kept fancying I saw you running away through the mountains with all those men trying to catch you.”

“So you didn't—really blame me?” Paul faltered. “You didn't think me so very, very bad?”

“No, I think I made a sort of martyr of you,” Ethel confessed. “I knew you did it impulsively, highly wrought up as you were over your poor father's death. You can't imagine how I worried the first few days after—after you left. You see, no one knew whether Jeff Warren would live or not. Oh, I was happy, Paul, when the doctor declared he was out of danger! I would have given a great deal then to have known how to reach you, but—but no one knew. Then, somehow, as the years passed, the impression got out that you were dead. Everybody seemed to believe it except old Mr. Tye, the shoemaker.”

“My faithful old friend!” Paul said. “He was constantly giving me good advice which I refused to take.”

“I sometimes go into his shop and sit and talk to him,” Ethel continued. “He is a queer old man, more like a saint than an ordinary human being. He declares he is in actual communion with God—says he has visions of things not seen by ordinary sight. He told me once, not long ago, that you were safe and well, and that you would come home again, and be happier than you ever were before. I remember I tried to hope that he knew. How strange that he guessed aright!”

“I understand him now better than I did when I was here,” Paul returned. “I didn't know it then, but I now believe such men as he are spiritually wiser than all the astute materialists the world has produced. What they know they get by intuition, and that comes from the very fountain of infinite wisdom to the humble perhaps more than to the high and mighty.”

“I am very happy to see you again,” Ethel declared, a shadow crossing her face; “but, Paul, you find me—you happen to find me in really great trouble.”

“You!” he cried. “Why?”

Ethel breathed out a tremulous sigh. “You have heard me speak of my cousin, Jennie Buford. She and I are more intimate than most sisters. We have been together almost daily all our lives. She is very ill. We were down to see her yesterday. She had an operation performed at a hospital a week ago, and her condition is quite critical. We would not have come back up here, but no one is allowed to see her, and I could be of no service. I am afraid she is going to die, and if she should—” Ethel's voice clogged, and her eyes filled.

“I'm so sorry,” Paul said, “but you mustn't give up hope.”

“Life seems so cruel—such a great waste of everything that is really worth while,” Ethel said, rebelliously. “Jennie's mother and father are almost crazed with grief. Jennie is engaged to a nice young man down there, and he is prostrated over it. Why, oh why, do such things happen?”

“There is a good reason for everything,” Paul replied, a flare of gentle encouragement in his serious eyes. “Often the things that seem the worst really are the best in the end.”

“There can be nothing good, or kind, or wise in Jennie's suffering,” Ethel declared, her pretty lips hardening, a shudder passing over her. “She is a sweet, good girl, and her parents are devout church members. The young man she is engaged to is the soul of honor, and yet all of us are suffering sheer agony.”

“You must try not to look at it quite that way,” Paul insisted, gently. “You must hope and pray for her recovery.”

Ethel shrugged her shoulders, buried her face in the ferns, and was silent. Presently, looking toward the farm-house, she said: “I see mother waiting for me. Good-by, I'll meet you at luncheon.” She was moving away, but paused and turned back. “You may think me lacking in religious feeling,” she faltered, her glance averted, “but I am very, very unhappy. I am sure the doctors are not telling us everything. I am afraid I'll never see Jennie alive again.”

He heard her sob as she abruptly turned away. He had an impulsive desire to follow and make a further effort to console her, but he felt instinctively that she wanted to be alone. He was sure of this a moment later, for he saw her using her handkerchief freely, and noted that she all but stumbled along the path leading up to the house. Mrs. Mayfield was waiting for her on the veranda, and Paul saw the older lady step down to the ground and hasten to meet her daughter.

“Poor, dear girl!” Paul said to himself, his face raised to the cloud-flecked sky. “Have I passed through my darkness and come out into the light, only to see her entering hers? O merciful God, spare her! spare her!”