Thor and Lois were glad of this interruption. They were glad of the new and exciting topic. They were glad of the family dinner at the other house, where they could be together and yet apart. Taking refuge from each other in any society they could find, they kept close to Mrs. Masterman when, after dinner, Thor's father retained his two old friends in the dining-room for the promised explanations. Later in the evening it was with an emotion like alarm that Lois heard that her parents had gone home without waiting to bear her company. Secretly she began to plan methods for stealing away alone. Her shyness of Thor was like nothing she had known in the days of courtship and marriage, or during the months in which they had been holding off from each other for scrutiny and reflection.

It was a shyness which, when they were at last side by side in the avenue, drove her to affect an over-elaboration of ease. She talked, not merely because there were so many things to say, but also for the sake of talking. She talked because he did not, because he towered above her in the moonlight, dumb, mysterious, waiting. It was that sense of his waiting that thrilled and terrified her most. It was a large waiting, patient and deep, the waiting for something predestined and inevitable that could take its time. It was like the waiting of the ocean for the streams, of sleep for the day's activities, or of death for all. It seemed to brood over her like the violet sky, and to quiver with radiance as the crisp air quivered with the moonlight. It was wide and restful and bracing. She was walking toward it, she was walking into it, as she walked over this virginal carpet of snow.

She talked with a kind of desperation—of Thor's father and mother first of all, of how good they were, each with a special variety of goodness. It was wonderful what sorrow had done for Mrs. Masterman. "I never see her now, Thor dear, without thinking of that look in Claude's face that seemed to us like dawn. I see it in her. Don't you?" Without waiting for an answer she hurried on. "And your father, Thor. He is good. No one but a good man could have been so noble toward poor old Fay, when he knows—when every one knows—no matter what was proved or wasn't proved in court—when he knows the truth." She seemed to be answering some unspoken argument on his side as she continued: "Oh yes, I remember what mamma wrote about it—about the hoodoo or the voodoo—mamma's so amusing!—but you and I have nothing to do with that, have we, Thor? We can only take what we see, and judge by what is best. And so with this wonderful new thing for papa and mamma—that they're to have some of their money back—we can't go behind it, can we? If he says it was a mistake we must accept it as that, and never, never let any other thought come into our minds. I know that papa and mamma, dear, innocent things—they are dear and innocent, you know, in spite of everything!—I know they'll only be too glad to take it in the same way."

Except for an occasional word he had hardly spoken by the time he had reached the corner of Willoughby's Lane and County Street. Lois had a renewal of the terror from which her own conversation had distracted her. The crucial minute was at hand. The door was but a few yards away. He would either go in with her—or he would go back. She hardly knew which would be the more supportable—the joy or the dismay.

She caught at the first possibility of postponing both. "Oh, it's so lovely! Let us walk on a little farther. It isn't half-past nine yet. I looked at the clock as we were coming out. Papa and mamma ran off so early. Don't you adore these windless winter nights?—when the air is as if it had been distilled." She paused in the middle of the road and looked around. "What's that star, Thor—over there—the one like a great white diamond?" He told her it was Sirius, adding that its light took eight years to travel to the earth, and going on to trace with his finger the constellation of the Dog. The minute's return to the old habits took some of the feverishness from her sense of tension as they continued their walk up the hill.

Up the hill there were only two directions in which to go—along the prosaic road to Marchfield or into the quiet winter woods where masses of shadow lay interspersed with patches of white moonlight, while, on this soundless night there was not a murmur in the tree-tops. By instinct rather than intention they followed a faint, familiar path running under pines.

Lois was now speaking of the Fays. "Mrs. Fay knows. The others don't—not certainly. Rosie has brought herself round to thinking him innocent, and Matt and Jim only suspect what happened—but Mrs. Fay knows. It must be a tragic thing to spend your life with a man who's done a thing like that. Poor soul! We must do what we can to help her, mustn't we?"

She pursued the theme not for its interest alone, but for the sake of the objective point to which it was leading her. By speaking freely, first of Matt and then of Jim Breen, she came at last to Rosie. She spoke freely of her, too, at the risk of opening up old wounds, at the risk of lacerating that which was probably still sensitive. Her main purpose was to speak, and if possible to make him speak, so that this name should no longer be kept as an inviolable symbol between them. Since the day when it began to have significance for them both it had scarcely been pronounced by either otherwise than allusively or of necessity. She was resolute to make it as little to be shunned as his or her own.

Not that she was successful, for the minute at any rate. His responses continued to be brief, so brief that they were hardly responses at all. They were not grudged or ungracious; they were only like those first little flashes of lightning which hint that the heavens will soon be alive. As a frightened boy whistles from bravado, she talked to conceal her trembling at this coming of celestial wonders.

"Oh, Thor, there'll be so much now to do! It's really only beginning, isn't it? And it brings in so many elements of our life—I mean of our whole national life. I like that. I like getting out of our own little groove—so futile and narrow as it generally is—and being in touch with what is stronger, even if it's terrific. That's what I feel about Matt Fay—that he's terrific. He represents a terrific movement, doesn't he? and one we can't ignore. When I say terrific I don't mean that I'm afraid of it. I'm not. It seems to me too strengthening to be afraid of. With all you can say against it, it strikes me as a tonic in our rather flaccid life, like iron in the blood. I've sympathy with it, too, to some extent; I've sympathy with him. You know, I do belong to the people. I'm glad we know him, and that in a way we've a right to get near to him. It puts us in touch with our own national realities as perhaps otherwise we shouldn't be. Oh, Thor, there's so much to work out! Isn't it a splendid thing that we can help even to the slightest degree in doing it!"

To this there was no response whatever. She was not sure that he listened. Beside her the tall form strode on dumb and dark, crunching the frozen snow with a creaking sound that roused the winged and furry things of the wood and silenced her half-hysterical efforts to fight against that which awaited her like a glory or a doom. Growing suddenly aware of the uselessness of speaking, she said no more.

After an interval in which her mind seemed to stop working, that of which she became conscious next was a world of extraordinary purity. Nothing was ever so white as this snow or this moonlight; nothing was ever so like the ether beyond the atmosphere as this air; nothing was ever so golden as the stars in this purple sky, or so mystically solemn as these pines. As they climbed upward it was like mounting into some crystal sphere, where evil was not an element.

They came out on that spot in which all the wood-paths converged, that treeless ridge that rose like a great white altar. It was an end which neither had foreseen when a half-hour earlier they had prolonged their walk; otherwise they might have shrunk from it. As it was, the association of the past with the present startled them, startled them into pausing long enough to become conscious, to seeing each in the eyes of the other such things as could not pass into words, before renewing the ascent. As they continued the way upward it was as if in fulfilment of some symbolic ceremonial.

They had stood for some minutes silent on the summit, looking out over the wide, white radiance at their feet, when Thor spoke. "I'm not thinking about the things you've been talking of. I'm not primarily interested in them any more."

"You mean—?"

"I mean the helping of others—in the way I've tried it. I see the mistake in that."

She was faintly surprised. "Indeed?"

"Through the things that have been happening I've worked out—I may say I've stumbled out—to a great truth."

There was not only surprise in her tone, but curiosity. "Yes, Thor dear. What is it?"

"It's that a man's first occupation is not with others, but with himself. It's not to put them right; it's to be right on his own account." As for the moment she was too disconcerted to comment on this, he continued: "If reaching this conclusion seems to you like discovering the obvious, I can only say that it hasn't been obvious to me. It's just beginning to come to me that I was so busy casting out other people's devils that I'd forgotten all about my own."

"You've been so generous in all you've thought about other people, Thor—"

He interrupted with decision. "The most effective way in which to be generous to other people is to be strict with one's self; but it never occurred to me till lately. I've been so eager that my neighbor's garden should be trim and productive, that mine has been overrun with weeds."

Against this self-condemnation she felt it her duty to protest. "But Uncle Sim says you've always been on the side of the—"

"Yes, I know," he broke in, with what was nearly a laugh. "But it's just where the dear old fellow has been wrong about me. I've wanted every one else to be there, on the side of the good things—I admit that—but I was to have plenty of rope. Now I'm coming to understand—and it's taken all this trouble to drive it home to my stupidity—that if I want to see any one else on the side of the angels I must get there first. That's where the ax must go to the root of the tree. In the main other people will take care of themselves if I take care of myself—and I'm going to try."

She was hurt on his behalf. "Oh, Thor, please don't say such things when you're so—so noble."

"I'm only saying them, Lois, to show you that I see what's been wrong with me from the start. You've tried to say it yourself at times, only I couldn't take it in. Do you remember the day in my office when you came to tell me that"—he nerved himself to approach the subject with the simple directness he knew she desired—"that Rosie had—?"

She hastened to come to his aid. "Yes, but I didn't mean it in just that way."

"No; but I do. I mean it because I can look back and trace it as the cause of all our disasters from—"

"Oh, Thor!" she pleaded.

He went on, steadily: "From the way in which I asked you to marry me right up to what—to what happened about Claude." He was obliged to draw a long, hard breath before saying more. "I was so determined that every one else should be right that I didn't care how wrong I was—which is like handing out water from a poisoned well."

She wished she could touch him, or slip her hand into his, by way of comfort, but the distance between them was still too great. She could only say: "That's putting it unjustly to yourself, Thor. If you've made mistakes they've been splendid ones. They've been finer than the ways in which most of us have been right."

She thought he smiled.

"Oh, I don't ask to be defended or explained. I only want to say that from to-night onward I shall be starting on a new plan of life. I shall be working from the inside, and not from the outside. If I'm to do anything in this world, something must first be accomplished in me—and I've got to begin." He turned from his contemplation of the dim, white landscape to look down at her. "Will you help me? Will you show me how?"

It seemed to her that without having moved she was somehow nearer to his breast. She couldn't so much as glance up at him. She could hardly speak. The words only trembled out as she said, "If I can, Thor dear."

"You can," he said, simply, "because you know."

She barely lifted her eyes. "Oh, do you think I do?"

"You've got the secret of it. There is a secret. I see that now—a secret, just as there is to everything else that's worth learning."

"Oh, Thor, you make me afraid—"

"Through all these dreadful months," he pursued, tranquilly, "you've kept us straight, and led us out, and raised us higher, not because you're specially strong, Lois, or specially wise, but because—because you've got some other quality. I want you to show me what it is, so that I may have it, too. If I could get it—get just a little of it—it would seem as if Claude hadn't—hadn't died in vain." She was now so near his breast that he was obliged to bend his head in order to speak down to her. "You wrote me last year that you were looking for a substitute for love. Couldn't you find it in that?"

She was so close to him that her cheek brushed the fur collar of his coat, yet she managed to keep her mind clear and to control her voice so as to ask the thing she most vitally needed to know. "And if I did, Thor—if I could—what should you find it in?"

"In adoration—for one thing," he said, simply.

It was such happiness that she tore herself away from it. Advancing swiftly over the light snow to a higher point of the summit, she stood for a minute poised alone against the dark sky, crowned to his eyes with a diadem of stars. Very slowly he strode after her, but even when he reached her side it was only to slip his hand into hers and gaze outward with her into the far, dim, restful spaces.

It was she who spoke at last, timidly, and against rising tears. "Shall we go home, Thor?"

"I'm at home," he said, quietly. But the quietness gave way suddenly to fierceness, as little lightning flashes yield in a few seconds to the violent magnificence of storm. Seizing her in his arms with a clasp that would have been brutal if it had not been so sweet, he whispered, "You're home to me, Lois—you're home to me."

"And you're the whole wide world to me, Thor dear," she answered, drawing his face downward.

THE END