Lawson's hard study was bringing its own reward. There were high opinions forming of him on quadrangle and in hall. But he gave no heed to them. He was holding to a grim determination, and the interest he felt growing stronger and stronger in his work was an incentive he had not expected. It was not often his mind went back to idle memories, or forward to visionary hopes; he lived as he swore he would do when he came back to the University, and he kept to his purpose with the self-will he had used in every other pursuit. As the days lengthened and the grass greened on the quadrangle and the maple blossoms drifted on the thick sward, the contest with himself grew harder. He had followed the bent of his humor always, and, with spring-tide abroad, the old desire for wandering came upon him. He had tramped, driven, roamed, lived [Pg 285]out-of-doors; had known a camp life in the Rockies, and the long lazy days by the ocean's swell at Santa Barbara, and the lazy loungings in foreign cities. Now when soft winds brought through his opened window a breath of fresh fields and opening leaf-buds, and the languorous odor of violets and hyacinths, and the hum of bees and the songs of mocking-birds, his room, with its worn floor and ashy hearth and dusty hangings, seemed stifling. The outside world called him.

He pushed his books from him, and his thoughts ran idly into a channel forbidden. He got to his feet and picked up his cap. He would have a long tramp up the sides of Mount Jefferson. As he opened the door the postman, going his afternoon rounds, called to him, "Mail for you," and held up a bunch of cards and papers and a letter.

Lawson glanced at them, stepped back into his room and closed the door. The letter was from his father, in his own handwriting. He wrote seldom. There was little he would say to his son through his secretary; and[Pg 286] what he said in his own style was ill-spelt, and his son was college-bred.

His son tore the letter open, devoured it with quick eyes. "My God! My God!" he half sobbed, as he leaned against the mantel, his face hidden on his arms. But it was not anguish which drew the cry, nor joy; for sorrow he would have set his lips and gone his way; and joy he dared not yet name this feeling which surged in his heart. He was suffocating. He opened his door, looked quickly up and down—he would see no one—almost ran down to the Serpentine walk and so out beyond West Range to the road, mountainward. Now he knew that the sun shone, that flowers were in bloom and birds a-wing, that winds were soft and skies were blue.

He pushed his cap back from his forehead so that the wind might blow across it, and he felt as if bands of torture and bitterness were melting at its touch.

Overhead, the buzzards floated in lazy luxury of flying, the crows called loudly; beyond the football grounds the farmer was[Pg 287] planting the red, fresh-ploughed field in corn; the golf links were green with new growth. He leaned his arms on the fence and watched some distant players, the opening buds of the wayside bushes making a screen about him. Then his gaze strayed to the oaks beyond, their red buds tossing softly. Farther on, the chestnuts showed pale leaves no bigger than a squirrel's ear, and up the mountain-side the forest ran in delicate waves of color, green upon green, and gray and red.

As he walked and breathed the pure air in an ecstasy of appreciation, he saw coming down the path under the red-tinted oaks one who might have been the spring expressed in physical form. Frances, her hands filled with dainty blossomings and leaf-buds, was walking blithely toward him, her face bright as the sky, and the peace that brooded upon it sweet as the sunshine on mountain and field. He could not have moved if he would, and he would not if he could. Hidden by the tangle of cedar and vine and bramble, in the fence corner, he could watch her through half closed eyes whose glance was a caress.[Pg 288] Turning his elbow on the old chestnut rail fence he watched her, scarcely breathing till she was abreast of him. Then he spoke, but only her name.

"Miss Holloway!

"I startled you! You must pardon me: you see I have been watching the players." He motioned towards the golf links. "Will you not wait a while," he begged; "I was thinking of you the moment I saw you. It was a dream come true," he added softly, "Thank God our dreams do come true, sometimes!

"There is something I must tell you," he said, after a moment's silence, while he strove to find speech for the thoughts he could not frame to words, but which were choking him for utterance. "You will wait?" for Frances had been too astonished to say anything beyond her murmured greeting, and stood startled, as if for instant flight, the red and white coming and going on her clear cheek.

"Last winter when I came to you," he blundered, and then the anger in her face gave him sudden cool courage, "I was not[Pg 289] free to do so—so you thought, I thought otherwise; you will do me the honor to believe it," coldly; "for fear of some misadventure I told you—"

"I have not forgotten," said Frances gently, as if to save him the pain of putting the thought into speech.

"Now, now—I have not said it yet, scarcely told it myself!—do not let me frighten you—I am free!"

The delicate flowers slipped from Frances' nerveless hands down to the ground and lay there in the path between them.

"Frances, I am free. Do you know what it means? That woman who bore my name is dead;" if he never spoke her name in reverence before he did so now, "she is dead. Did you think I went away for pleasure, Christmas?" he hurried on, almost breathlessly. "She wrote to me. I had not heard from her for five years. My lawyer was told never to mention her name to me. But she wrote that very day, no, the next,"—he put his hand to his head confusedly, he could not tell her all the pain, the bitterness, he had[Pg 290] felt,—"she wrote begging me to come. She was dying, she said. I went; I telegraphed my father to meet me there. She saw us both; she had not been so bad, perhaps, as we thought; it was the devil of show and selfishness and restlessness which possessed her, and I must have seemed to her at the first, long ago, to be a very fool, to be wheedled, to be—I don't think she ever dreamed it was in me to leave her. She had taken her divorce in half-angry, half-amused carelessness; so long as she got what she wanted, what did it matter, and that was wealth! I must tell you this, Frances, once for all, then it shall be dead between us, as she is. The doctor said she would live a week. I came back, knowing this. I saw you! You will never know how I was tempted, but there was a vileness I could not sink to! I could not build dreams of happiness upon the shortness of her life!

"If I had not studied until there was no thought day by day, week by week—work! They think I love it. God! I have been[Pg 291] buried, dead, have been buried, and now am alive!"

He put his hand on hers, clenched before her. "You are thinking how unlike I am to anything you ever dreamed of me. I am! I do not know myself! Think if you can—five years of shame, and now freedom and the world—and you! You are not shocked, Frances, that I am glad?"

There ............