way, but it would reach the far wanderer before any
leave would permit him to start homeward.

So, now, what should she write? If her father had discerned so much more
than he had let any one know he had discerned, how about others? How
about the kind whose chief joy is ruthless guesswork? _That_ need
of haste was one she had overlooked. Wise father!

And yet--haste itself is such a hazardous thing! Ah, if Arthur had come
in on that evening express, what to write were an easier question. The
minutes sped by; her pen overhung the paper with the opening sentence
unfinished, and every moment the thought she kept putting away came
back: "Leonard!--Leonard!--Godfrey's summons should go to him from
Leonard; and it should flash under the seas, not crawl across
them!"--Hark!

She rose and glided to the door through which her brother had gone.
There she was startled by the sight of him speeding cautiously down
the stair.

* * * * *

On entering his unlighted room Leonard had moved across it to a front
window, where, veiled by the chamber's dusk, he stood looking out into a
night dimly illumined by the overclouded moon. The Winslow house widened
palely among its surrounding trees. The servants' rooms were remote as
well as on the farther side, and on the nearer side no lamplight shone.
A short way down the street a glow came from the Morris cottage.
Evidently Isabel was with her mother.

He stood and mused, unconsciously lulled by the cool drip of myriad
leaves, and with his mind poised midway between emotion and thought. To
yield to emotion would have been to chafe against the bands that knitted
his life and hers to every life about them. To yield to thought would
have been to think of her as no more to be drawn from these surrounding
ties than some animate rainbow-fringed flower of the sea can be torn
from its shell without laceration and death. To give thought word would
have been to cry, "Oh, truest of womankind, where would this unsuspected
man, this Leonard Byington, be if you were other than you are?" Yet the
suspense between avoided feeling and avoided thought held him where he
stood.

So standing, it drifted idly into his mind that yonder arbor must be
very wet to-night, and the cinder sidewalk out here much drier. As the
thought moved him to draw one step back, the glow from the cottage
broadened. Its front door had opened, and Mrs. Morris's young maid came
out with a lantern, fol