The grim posse that gathered in haste that afternoon did not ride far. Its work had been singularly well done. It brought back to Damory Court, however, a white bulldog whose broken leg made his would-be joyful bark trail into a sad whimper as his owner took him into welcoming arms.

Next day the major was carried to his final rest in the myrtled shadow of St. Andrew’s. At the service the old church was crowded to its doors. Valiant occupied a humble place at one side—the others, he knew, were older friends than he. The light of the late afternoon came dimly in through the stained-glass windows and seemed to clothe with subtle colors the voice of the rector as he read the solemn service. The responses came brokenly, and there were tears on many faces.

Valiant could see the side-face of the doctor, its saturnine grimness strangely moved, and beyond him, Shirley and her mother. Many glanced at them, for the major’s will had been opened that morning and few there had been surprised to learn that, save for a life-annuity for old Jereboam, he had left everything he possessed to Shirley. Miss Mattie Sue was beside them, and between, wan with weeping, sat Rickey Snyder. Shirley’s arm lay shelteringly about the small shoulders as if it would stay the passion of grief that from time to time shook them.

The evening before had been further darkened by the child’s disappearance and Miss Mattie Sue had sat through half the night in tearful anxiety. It was Valiant who had solved the riddle. In her first wild compunction, Rickey had gasped out the story of her meeting with Greef King, his threat and her own terrorized silence, and when he heard of this he had guessed her whereabouts. He had found her at the Dome, in the deserted cabin from which on a snowy night six years ago, Shirley had rescued her. She had fled there in her shabbiest dress, her toys and trinkets left behind, taking with her only a string of blue glass beads that had been Shirley’s last Christmas present.

“Let me stay!” she had wailed. “I’m not fit to live down there! It’s all my fault that it happened. I was a coward. I ought to stay here in Hell’s-Half-Acre forever and ever!” Valiant had carried her back in his arms down the mountain—she had been too spent to walk.

He thought of this now as he saw that arm about the child in that protective, almost motherly gesture. It made his own heartache more unbearable. Such a little time ago he had felt that arm about him!

He leaned his hot head against the cool plastered wall, trying to keep his mind on the solemn reading. But Shirley’s voice and laugh seemed to be running eerily through the chanting lines, and her face shut out pulpit and lectern. It swept over him suddenly that each abominable hour could but make the situation more impossible for them both. He had seen her as she entered the church, had thought her even paler than in the wood, the bluish shadows deeper under her eyes. Those delicate charms were in eclipse.

And it was he who was to blame!

It came to him with a stab of enlightenment. He had been thinking only of himself all the while. But for her, it was his presence that had now become the unbearable thing. A cold sweat broke on his forehead. “... for I am a stranger with thee, and a sojourner: as all my fathers were. O spare me a little, that I may recover my strength before I go hence....” The intoning voice fell dully on his ears.

To go away! To pass out of her life, to a future empty of her? How could he do that? When he had parted from her in the rain he had felt a frenzy of obstinacy. It had seemed so clear that the barrier must in the end yield before their love. He had never thought of surrender. Now he told himself that flight was all that was left him. She—her happiness—nothing else mattered. Damory Court and its future—the plans he had made—the Valiant name—in that clarifying instant he knew that all these, from that May day on the Red Road, had clung about her. She had been the inspiration of all.

“Lead, kindly Light, amid th’ encircling gloom—”

The voices of the unvested choir rose clearly and some one at his side was whispering that this had been the major’s favorite hymn. But he scarcely heard.

When the service was ended the people filled the big yard while the last reverent words were spoken at the grave. Valiant, standing with the rest, saw Shirley, with her mother and the doctor, pass out of the gate. She was not looking toward him. A mist was before his eyes as they drove away, and the vision of her remained wavering and indistinct—a pale blurred face under shining hair.

He realized after a time that the yard was empty and the sexton was locking the church door. He went slowly to the gate, and just outside some one spoke to him. It was Chisholm Lusk. They had not met since the night of the ball. Even in his own preoccupation, Valiant noted that Lusk’s face seemed to have lost its exuberant youthfulness. It was worn as if with sleeplessness, and had a look of suffering that touched him. And all at once, while they stood looking at each other, Valiant knew what the other had waited to say.

“I won’t beat about the bush,” said Lusk stammering. “I’ve got to ask you something. I reckon you’ve guessed that I—that Shirley—”

Valiant touched the young fellow’s arm. “Yes,” he said, “I think I know.”

“It’s no new thing, with me,” said the other hoarsely. “It’s been three years. The night of the ball, I thought perhaps that—I don’t mean to ask what you might have a right to resent—but I must find out. Is there any reason why I shouldn’t try my luck?”

Valiant shook his head. “No,” he said heavily, “there is no reason.”

The boyish look sprang back to Lusk’s face. He drew a long breath. “Why, then I will,” he said. “I—I’m sorry if I hurt you. Heaven knows I didn’t want to!”

He grasped the other’s hand with a man’s heartiness and went up the road with a swinging stride; and Valiant stood watching him go, with his hands tight-clenched at his side.

A little later Valiant climbed the sloping driveway of Damory Court. It seemed to stare at him from a thousand reproachful eyes. The bachelor red squirrel from his tree-crotch looked down at him askance. The redbirds, flashing through the hedges, fluttered disconsolately. Fire-Cracker, the peacock, was shrieking from the upper lawn and the strident discord seemed to mock his mood.

The great house had become home to him; he told himself that he would make no other. The few things he had brought—his books and trophies—had grown to be a part of it, and they should remain. The ax should not be laid to the walnut grove. As his father had done, he would leave behind him the life he had lived there, and the old Court should be once more closed and deserted. Uncle Jefferson and Aunt Daphne might live on in the cabin back of the kitchens. There was pasturage for the horse and the cows and for old Sukey, and some acres had already been cleared for planting. And there would be the swans, the ducks and chickens, the peafowl and the fish.

A letter had come to him that morning. The Corporation had resumed business with credit unimpaired. Public opinion was more than friendly now. A place waited for him there, and one of added honor, in a concern that had rigorously cleansed itself and already looked forward to a new career of prosperity. But he thought of this now with no thrill. The old life no longer called. There were still wide unpeopled spaces somewhere where a man’s hand and brain were no less needed, and there was work there that would help him to bear, if not forget.

He paced up and down the porch under the great gray columns, his steps spiritless and lagging. The Virginia creeper, trailing over its end, waved to and fro with a sound like a sigh. How long would it be before the lawn was once more unkempt and draggled? Before burdock and thistle, mullein and Spanish-needle would return to smother the clover? Before Damory Court, on which he had spent such loving labor, would lie again as it lay that afternoon when he had rattled thither on Uncle Jefferson’s crazy hack? Before there would be for him, in some far-away corner of the world, only Wishing-House and the Never-Never Land?

In the hall he stood a moment before the fireplace, his eyes on its carven motto, I clinge: the phrase was like a spear-thrust. He began to wander restlessly through the house, up and down, like a prowling animal. The dining-room looked austere and chill—only the little lady in hoops and love-curls who had been his great-grandmother smiled wistfully down from her gilt frame above the console—and in the library a melancholy deeper than that of yesterday’s tragedy seemed to hang, through which Devil-John, drawing closer the leash of his leaping hound, glared sardonically at him from his one cold eye. The shutters of the parlor were closed, but he threw them open and let the rich light pierce the yellow gloom, glinting from the figures in the cabinet and weaving a thousand tiny rainbows in the prisms of the great chandelier.

He went up-stairs, into the bedrooms one by one, now and then passing his hand over a polished chair-back or touching an ornament or a frame on the wall: into The Hilarium with its records of childish study and play. The dolls stood now on dress-parade in glass cases, and prints in bright colors, dear to little people, were on the walls. He opened the shutters here, too, and stood some time on the threshold before he turned and went heavily down-stairs.

Through the rear door he could see the kitchens, and Aunt Daphne sitting under the trumpet-vine piecing a nine-patch calico quilt with little squares of orange and red and green cloth. Two diminutive darkies were sprawled on the ground looking up at her with round serious eyes, while a wary bantam pecked industriously about their bare legs.

“En den whut de roostah say, Aunt Daph?”

“Ol’ roostah he hollah ter all he wifes, ‘Oo—ooo! Oo—ooo! Young Mars’ come!—Young Mars’ come! Young Mars’ come!’ En dey all mighty skeered, ’case Mars’ John he cert’n’y fond ob fried chick’n. But de big tuhkey gobbler he don’ b’leeve et ’tall. ‘Doubtful—doubtful—doubtful!’ he say, lak dat. Den de drake he peep eroun’ de cornah, en he say, ‘Haish! Haish! Haish!’ Fo’ he done seed Mars’ John comin’, sho’ nuff. But et too late by den, fo’ Aunt Daph she done grab Mis’ Pullet, en Mars’ John he gwineter eat huh dis bery evenin’ fo’ he suppah. Now you chillen run erlong home ter yo’ mammies, en don’ yo’ pick none ob dem green apples on de way, neidah.”

It was not till after dark had come that Valiant said good-by to the garden. He loved it best under the starlight. He sat a long hour under the pergola overlooking the lake, where he could dimly see the green rocks, and the white froth of the water bubbling and chuckling down over their rounded outlines to the shrouded level below. The moon lifted finally and soared through the sky, blowing out the little lamps of stars. Under its light a gossamer mist robed the landscape in a shimmering opalescence, in which tree and shrub altered their values and became transmuted to silver sentinels, watching over a demesne of violet-velvet shadows filled with sleepy twitterings and stealthy rustlings and the odor of wild honeysuckle.

At last he stood before the old sun-dial, rearing its column from its pearly clusters of blossoms. “I count no hours but the happy ones”: he read the inscription with an indrawn breath. Then, groping at its base, he lifted the ivy that had once rambled there and drew up the tangle again over the stone disk. His Bride’s-Garden!

In the library, an hour later, sitting at the big black pigeonholed desk, he wrote to Shirley: