Helen was to sail for Boston the following Saturday. It lacked three days of that date. It being out of the question to reach her, now, by letter, Bayard cabled to her:—

To this impulsive message he found himself expecting a reply. The wan missionary had burst into a boyish and eager lover. Oh, that conscientious, cruel past! He dashed it from him. He plunged into the freedom of his heart. In honor—in his delicate honor—he could win her, now.

Helen did not answer the cable message. A hundred hindrances might have prevented her; yet he had believed she would. He thought of her ardent, womanly candor, her beautiful courage, her noble trust. It did not occur to him that a woman has two natures, this for the unfortunate and that for the fortunate lover. One he had tasted; the other he had yet to know.

He vibrated restlessly to and fro between Windover and Boston, where his presence was urgently required in the settlement of his uncle’s affairs. A snowstorm set in, and increased to a gale. Ten days passed, somehow. The steamer was due in twenty-four hours. She did not arrive.

Bayard had lived in Windover long enough to acquire the intelligent fear of the sea which characterizes the coast; and when the next day went, and another, and the boat was admitted at headquarters to be three days overdue, he suffered the unspeakable. It had been nothing less than a terrible midwinter gale. Wrecks lined the coast; glasses scoured it; watchers thronged it; friends besieged the offices of the steamship company. The great line which boasted that it had never lost a life held its stanchest steamer three days—four days overdue.

It was like him that he did not overlook his duty in his trouble, but stood to his post, and remembered the little service appointed for that most miserable evening when he was expected to be with his people. Those who were present that night say that the scene was one impossible to forget. Looking more like death than life, the preacher prayed before them “to the God of the sea.”

Now, for the first time, he felt that he knew what Windover could suffer. Now the torment of women all their lives watching for returning sails entered into his soul; those aged men looking for the sons who never came back; the blurred eyes peering off Windover Point to see the half-mast flag on the schooner as she tacked up the bay; the white lips that did not ask, when the boat came to anchor, “Which is it?” because they dared not—all this, now, he understood.

His personal anguish melted into the great sum of misery in the seaport town.

“If she comes back to me,” he thought, “how I shall work for them—my poor people!”

Now, for the first time, this devout, unselfish man understood that something else than consecration is needed to do the best and greatest thing by the human want or woe that leans upon us. Now that he took hold on human experience, he saw that he had everything to learn from it. The knowledge of a great love, the lesson of the common tie that binds the race together—these taught him, and he was their docile scholar.

Five days overdue!... Six days. Bayard had gone back to Boston, to haunt the offices and the docks. Old friends met him among the white-lipped watchers, and a classmate said:—

“Thank God, Bayard, you haven’t wife and child aboard her.”

He added:—

“Man alive! You look like the five days dead!”

Suddenly, the stir ran along the crowd, and a whisper said:—

“They’ve sighted her!... She’s in!”

Then came the hurrah. Shouts of joy reËchoed about him. But Bayard’s head fell upon his breast in silence. At that moment he was touched upon the arm by a beautiful Charter Oak cane, and, looking up, he saw the haggard face of the Professor of Theology.

“I was belated,” thickly articulated the Professor with dry lips. “I came straight from the lecture-room. It is the course on the ‘Nature of Eternal Punishment,’—a most important course. I felt it my duty to be at my desk. But—Bayard, I think I shall substitute to-morrow my lecture (perhaps you may recall it) on the ‘Benevolence and Beneficence of God.’”

The two men leaped into the tug together, and ploughed out to the steamer.

Helen was forward, leaning on the rail. Her thick steamer-dress blew like muslin in the heavy wind. Her eyes met Bayard’s first—yes, first. Her father came in second, but his were too dim to know it.

“Mother is in the cabin, dear Papa!” cried Helen; “we have to keep her warm and still, you know.”

His daughter’s precious kiss invited him, but the old man put Helen gently aside, and dashed after his old wife.

For that moment Helen and Bayard stood together. Before all the world he would have taken her in his arms, but she retreated a little step.

“Did you get my message?” he demanded.

“Yes.”

“Did you answer it?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I thought it would do just as well when I got here.”

“And you might have been—you might never have got here at all!” cried Bayard fiercely.

“Have you been anxious?” asked Helen demurely.

He did not think it was in her to coquette with a man in a moment like that, and he made her no reply. Then Helen looked full in his face, and saw the havoc on it.

“Oh, you poor boy!” she whispered; “you poor, poor boy!”

---

This was in the afternoon; and he was compelled to see her carried off to Cesarea on her father’s arm, without him. There was no help for it; and he waited till the next day, unreconciled and nervous in the extreme. He had been so overworn and overwrought, that his mind took on feverish fancies.

“Something may happen by to-morrow,” he thought, “and I shall have never—once”—

He rebuked even his own thought, even then, for daring to dream of the touch of her lips. But the dream rode over his delicacy, and rushed on.

At an early hour the next day he went to Cesarea, and sought her in her father’s house. It was a cold, dry, bright day. Cesarea shivered under her ermine. The Professor’s house was warm with the luxurious, even warmth of the latest modern heater, envied by the rest of the Faculty, in the old-fashioned, draughty houses of the Professors’ Row. Flowers in the little window conservatory of the drawing-room breathed the soft air easily, and were of rich growth and color. Helen was watering the flowers. She colored when she saw him, and put down the silver pitcher which she had abstracted from the breakfast-room for the purpose of encouraging her lemon verbena, that had, plainly, missed her while she was abroad. She wore a purple morning-gown with plush upon it. She had a royal look.

“How early you have come!” she said half complainingly.

He paid no attention to her tone, but deliberately shut the door, and advanced towards her.

“I have come,” he said, “to stay; that is—if you will let me, Helen.”

“Apparently,” answered Helen, taking up the pitcher, “I am not allowed a choice in the matter.”

But he saw that the silver pitcher shook in her hand.

“No,” he said firmly, “I do not mean to give you any choice. I mean to take you. I do not mean to wait one hour more.”

He held out his arms, but suspended them, not touching her. The very air which he imprisoned around her seemed to clasp her. She trembled in that intangible embrace.

“It will be a poor man’s home, Helen—but you will not suffer. I can give you common comforts. I cabled to you the very hour that I knew.... Oh, I have trusted your trust!” he said.

“And you may trust it,” whispered Helen, suddenly lifting her eyes.

His, it seemed to her, were far above her—how blinding beautiful joy made them!

Then his starved arms closed about her, and his lips found hers.

---

The Professor of Theology sat in his study. The winter sun struck his loaded shelves; the backs of his books inspected him tenderly. At the western window, on the lady’s desk which was reserved for Mrs. Carruth, her sewing-basket stood. The Professor glanced at it contentedly. He had never been separated from his wife so long before, and they had been married thirty-five years. She had unpacked that basket and taken it into the study that morning, with a girlish eagerness to sit down and darn a stocking while the Professor wrote.

“This is a great gratification, Statira,” he had said.

Mrs. Carruth had gone out, now, to engage in the familiar delights of a morning contest with the Cesarea butcher, and the Professor was alone when Emanuel Bayard sturdily knocked at the study door.

The Professor welcomed the young man with some surprise, but no uncertain warmth. He expressed himself as grateful for the prompt attention of his former pupil, on the joyful occasion of this family reunion.

“And it was kind of you, Bayard, too—meeting the ladies on that tug. I was most agreeably surprised. I was wishing yesterday—in fact, it occurred to me what a comfort some young fellow would have been whom I could have sent down, all those anxious days. But we never had a son. Pray sit down, Mr. Bayard.... I am just reading the opinions of Olshausen on a most interesting point. I have collected valuable material in Berlin. I shall be glad to talk it over with you. I found Professor Kammelschkreiter a truly scholarly man. His views on the errors in the Revised Version are the most instructed of any I have met.”

“Professor,” said Bayard stoutly, “will you pardon me if I interrupt you for a minute? I have come on a most important matter. I am sorry to seem uncivil, but the fact is I—I cannot wait another moment, sir.... Sir, I have the honor to tell you that your daughter has consented to become my wife.”

At this truly American declaration, the Professor of Theology laid down his copy of Olshausen, and stared at the heretic missionary.

“My daughter!” he gasped, “your wife?—I beg your pardon,” he added, when he saw the expression of Bayard’s face. “But you have taken me altogether by surprise. I may say that such a possibility has never—no, never once so much as occurred to me.”

“I have loved her,” said Bayard tenaciously, “for three years. I have never been able to ask her to marry me till now. I think perhaps my uncle meant to make it possible for me to do so, but I do not know. I am still a poor man, sir, but I can keep her from suffering. She does me the undeserved honor to love me, and she asked me to tell you so.”

The Professor had risen and was pacing the study hotly. His face was rigid. He waved his thin, long fingers impatiently at Bayard’s words.

“Scholars do not dwell upon paltry, pecuniary facts like parents in lower circles of society!” cried the Professor with superbly unconscious hauteur. “There would have lacked nothing to my daughter’s comfort, sir, in any event—if the right man had wooed her. I was not the father to refuse him mere pecuniary aid to Helen’s happiness.”

“And I was not the lover to ask for it,” observed Bayard proudly.

“Hum—m—m,” said the Professor. He stopped his walk across the study floor, and looked at Bayard with troubled respect.

“I will not take her from you at once,” urged Bayard gently; “we will wait till fall—if I can. She has said that she will become my wife, then.”

His voice sank. He spoke the last words with a delicate reverence which would have touched a ruder father than the Professor of Theology.

“Bayard,” he said brokenly, “you always were my favorite student. I couldn’t help it. I always felt a certain tenderness for you. I respect your intellectual traits, and your spiritual quality. Poverty, sir? What is poverty? But, Bayard, you are not sound!”

Against this awful accusation Bayard had no reply; and the old Professor turned about ponderously, like a man whose body refused to obey the orders of his shocked and stricken mind.

“How can I see my daughter, my daughter, the wife of a man whom the Ancient Faith has cast out?” he pleaded piteously.

He lifted his shrunken hands, as if he reasoned before an invisible tribunal. His attitude and expression were so solemn that Bayard felt it impossible to interrupt the movement by any mere lover’s plea. Perhaps, for the first time, he understood then what it meant to the old man to defend the beliefs that had ruled the world of his youth and vigor; he perceived that they, too, suffered who seemed to be the inflicters of suffering; that they, too, had their Calvary—these determined souls who doggedly died by the cross of the old Faith in whose shelter their fathers and their fathers’ fathers had lived and prayed, had battled and triumphed. Bayard felt that his own experience at that moment was an intrusion upon the sanctuary of a sacred struggle. He bowed his head before his Professor, and left the study in silence.

But Helen, who had the small reverence for the theologic drama characteristic of those who have been reared upon its stage, put her beautiful arms around his neck and, laughing, whispered:—

“Leave the whole system of Old School Orthodoxy to me! I can manage!”

“You may manage him,” smiled Bayard, “but can you manage it?”

“Wait a day, and see!” said Helen.

He would have waited a thousand for the kiss with which she lifted up the words.

The next day she wrote him, at Windover, where he was dutifully trying to preach as if nothing had happened:—

“Papa says I have never been quite sound myself, and that he supposes I will do as I please, as I always have.”

There followed a little love-letter, so deliciously womanly and tender, that Bayard did not for hours open the remainder of his mail. When he did so, he read what the Professor of Theology had written, after a night of prayer and vigil such as only aged parents know.

---