It was a fair, sweet evening, and the room where Jessica sat beside David Stires' bed, reading aloud to him, was flooded with the failing sunlight. The height was still in brightness, but the gulches below were wine-red and on their rims the spruces stood shadow-straight against the golden ivory of the southern sky. Since the old man's seizure in the night he had been much worse and she had scarcely left his room. To-day, however, he had sat propped by pillows, able to read and chat, and the deep personal anxiety that had numbed her had yielded. She was reading now from a life of that poetess whose grave has made a lonely Colorado mountain a place of pilgrimage. She read in a low voice, holding the page to the dimming light:

"The spot she chose was a bare knoll, facing out across the curved chasm, the wide empty gulf on three sides, a plot hounded by a knot of noble trees that whispered softly together. Here above the sky was beautifully blue, the searching fall wind that numbed the fingers in the draw of the gorge was gone, and the warm sunshine was mellow and pleasant. It was a spot to dream in, leaning upon the great facts of God that He teaches best to those who love His Nature. A spot in which to be laid at last for the long sleep, when mortal dreams are over and work is done."

"That is beautiful," he said. "I should choose a spot like that." He pointed down the long slope, where a red beam of the sun touched the gray face of the Knob and turned it to a spot of crimson-lake. "That must be such a place."

Her cheeks flushed. She knew what he was thinking. He would not wish to lie in the far-away cemetery that looked down on the white house in the aspens, the theater of his son's downfall! The Knob, she thought with a thrill, overlooked the place of Hugh's regeneration.

A knock came at the door. It was a nurse with letters for him from the mail, and while he opened them Jessica laid aside the book and went slowly down the hall to the sun-parlor, where the doctor stood with the group gathered after the early supper, chatting of the newest "strike" on the mountain.

"We'll be famous if we keep on," he was saying, as she looked out of the wide windows across the haze where the sunlight drifted down in dust of gold. "I've a mind to stake out a claim myself."

"We pay you better," said one of the occupants grimly. "Anyway, the whole of Smoky Mountain was staked in the excitement a year ago. There's no doubt about this find, I suppose?"

"It's on exhibition at the bank," the doctor replied. "More than five thousand dollars, cached in a crevice in the glacial age, as neat as a Christmas stocking!"

"Wish it was my stocking," grunted the other. "It would help pay my bill here."

The man of medicine laughed and nodded to Jessica where she stood, her cheeks reddened by the crimsoning light. She had scarcely listened to the chatter, or, if she did, paid little heed. All her thoughts were with the man she loved. Watching the luminous purple shadows grow slowly over the landscape, she longed to run down to the Knob, to sit where she had first spoken to him, perhaps by very excess of yearning to call him to her side. She had a keen sense of the compunction he must feel, and longed, as love must, to reassure him.

The talk went on about her.

"Where is the lucky claim?" some one asked.

"Just below this ridge," the doctor replied. "It is called the 'Little Paymaster.'"

The name caught her ear now. The Little Paymaster? That was the name on the tree—on Hugh's claim! At that instant she thought she heard David Stires calling. She turned and ran quickly up the long hall to his open door.

The sight of his face at first startled her, for it was held captive of emotion; but it was an emotion of joy, not of pain. A letter fluttered in his grasp. He thrust it into her hands.

"Jessica!" he exclaimed. "Hugh has paid it! He has sent the five thousand dollars, interest and principal, to the bank, to my account."

For a moment she stood transfixed. The talk she had mechanically heard leaped into significance, and her mind ran back to the hour when she had left the draft at the cabin. She caught the old man's hand and knelt by his chair, laughing and crying at once.

"I knew—oh, I knew!" she cried, and hid her face in the coverlet.

"It is what I have prayed for," he said, after a moment, in a shaking voice. "I said I hoped I would never see his face again, but I was bitter then. He was my only son, after all, and he is your husband. I have thought it all over lying here."

Jessica lifted her eyes, shining with a great thankfulness. During these last few days the impulse to tell all that she had concealed had been almost irresistible; now the barrier had fallen. The secret she had repressed so long came forth in a rush of sentences that left him mute and amazed.

"I should have told you before," she ended, "but I didn't know—I wasn't sure—" She broke down for very joy.

He looked at her with eyes unnaturally bright. "Tell me everything, Jessica!" he said. "Everything from the beginning!"

She drew the shade wider before the open window, where he could look down across the two miles of darkening foliage to the far huddle of the town—a group of toy houses now hazily indistinct—and, seated beside him, his hand in hers, poured out the whole. She had never framed it into words; she had pondered each incident severally, apart, as it were, from its context. Now, with the loss of memory and the pitiful struggle of recollection as a background, the narrative painted itself in vivid colors to whose pathos and meaning her every instinct was alive. Her first view of Hugh, the street fight and the revelation of the violin—the part she and Prendergast had taken—the rescue of the child—the leaving of the draft in the cabin, and the strange sleep-walking that had so nearly found a dubious ending—she told all. She did not realize that she was revealing the depths of her own heart without reserve. If she omitted to tell of his evil reputation and the neighborhood's hatred, who could blame? She was a woman, and she loved them both.

Dusk came before the moving recital was finished. The rose of sunset grew over the trellised west, faded, and the gloom deepened to darkness, pricked by stars. The old man from the first had scarcely spoken. When she ended she could hardly see his face, and waited anxiously to hear what he might say. Presently he broke the silence.

"He was young and irresponsible, Jessica," he said. "Money always came so easily. He didn't realize what he was doing when he signed that draft. He has learned a lesson out in the world. It won't hurt his career in the end, for no one but you and I and one other knows it. Thank God! If his memory comes back—"

"Oh, it will!" she breathed. "It must! That day on the Knob he only needed the clue! When I tell him who I am, he will know me. He will remember it all. I am sure—sure! Will you let me bring him to you?" she added softly.

"Yes," he said, pressing her hand, "to-morrow. I shall be stronger in the morning."

She rose and lighted the lamp, shading it from his eyes.

"Do you remember the will, Jessica?" he asked her presently. "The will I drew the day he came back? You never knew, but I signed it—the night of your wedding. Harry Sanderson was right, my dear, wasn't he?

"I wish now I hadn't signed it, Jessica," he added. "I must set it right—I must set it right!" He watched her with a smile on his face. "I will rest now," he said, and she adjusted the pillows and turned the lamp low.

Crossing the room, she stepped through the long window on to the porch, and stood leaning on the railing. From the dark hedges where the brown birds built came a drowsy twitter as from a nest of dreams. A long time she stood there, a thousand thoughts busy in her brain—of Hugh, of the beckoning future. She thought of the day she had destroyed the model that her fingers longed to remold, now that the Prodigal was indeed returned. The words of the biblical narrative flashed through her mind: And he arose and came to his father. But when he was yet a great way off, his father saw him, and had compassion, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him. So Hugh's father would meet him now! The dewed odors of the jasmin brought the memory of that stormy night when he had come to her in his sleep. She imagined she heard again his last word—his whispered "Good-by" in the sound of the rain.

She thought it a memory, but the word that flashed into her mind was carried to her from the shadow, where a man stood in the shrubbery watching her dim figure and her face white and beautiful in the light from a near-by window, with a passionate longing and rebellion.

Harry was seeing her, he told himself, for the last time. He had made up his mind to this on that stormy morning when he had found the lucky crevice. For days he had labored, spurred by a fierce haste to make requital. Till the last ounce of the rich "pocket" had been washed, and the whole taken to the bank in the town, no one had known of the find. It had repaid the forgery and left him a handful of dollars over—enough to take him far away from the only thing that made life worth the effort. He had climbed to the ridge on the bare chance of seeing Jessica—not of speaking to her. Watching her, it required all his repression not to yield to the reckless desire that prompted him to go to her, look into her eyes, and tell her he loved her. He made a step forward, but stopped short, as she turned and vanished through the window.

Standing on the porch, a gradual feeling of apprehension had come to Jessica—an impression of blankness and chill that affected her strangely. Inside the room she stood still, frightened at the sudden sense of utter soundlessness.

She caught up the lamp, and, turning the wick, approached the bed. She put out her hand and touched the wasted one on the coverlet. Then a sobbing cry came from her lips.

David Stires was gone. A crowning joy had goldened his bitterness at the last moment, and he had gone away with his son's face in his heart and the smile of welcome on his lips.