"ZOE LE BARON."
That was all.Just a girlish,constrained letter,hardly hinting at the hot tears that had been shed for many weary nights,coyly telling of the impatient young love and all the maidenly shame.
David permitted himself to read it only once.Then a sudden resolution was born --a heroic one.Before he got the letter he was a crushed and unsophisticated boy;when he had read it,and absorbed its full significance,he became suddenly a man,capable of a great sacrifice.
"I return your letter,"he wrote,without superscription,"and thank you for your anxiety about me.But the truth is,I had forgotten all about you in my trouble.You were not in the least to blame for what hap-pened.I might have known I would come to such an end.You thought I was good,of course;but it is not easy to find out the life of a young man.It is rather mortifying to have a private letter sent here,because the warden reads them all.I hope you will enjoy yourself this winter,and hasten to forget one who had certainly forgotten you till reminded by your letter,which I return.
"Respectfully,"DAVID CULROSS."
That night some deep lines came into his face which never left it,and which made him look like a man of middle age.
He never doubted that his plan would succeed;that,piqued and indignant at his ingratitude,she would hate him,and in a little time forget he ever lived,or remember him only to blush with shame at her past association with him.He saw her happy,loved,living the usual life of women,with all those things that make life rich.
For there in the solitude an understanding of deep things came to him.He who thought never to have a wife grew to know what the joy of it must be.He perceived all the subtle rapture of wedded souls.He learned what the love of children was,the pride of home,the unselfish ambition for success that spurs men on.All the emo-tions passed in procession at night before him,tricked out in palpable forms.
A burst of girlish tears would dissipate whatever lingering pity Zoe felt for him.
How often he said that!With her sensitiveness she would be sure to hate a man who had mortified her.
So he fell to dreaming of her again as moving among happy and luxurious scenes,exquisitely clothed,with flowers on her bosom and jewels on her neck;and he saw men loving her,and was glad,and saw her at last loving the best of them,and told himself in the silence of the night that it was as he wished.
Yet always,always,from weary week to weary week,he rehearsed the scenes.They were his theatre,his opera,his library,his lecture hall.
He rehearsed them again there on the cars.He never wearied of them.To be sure,other thoughts had come to him at night.Much that to most men seems com-plex and puzzling had grown to appear simple to him.In a way his brain had quickened and deepened through the years of solitude.He had thought out a great many things.He had read a few good books and digested them,and the visions in his heart had kept him from being bitter.
Yet,suddenly confronted with liberty,turned loose like a pastured colt,without master or rein,he felt only confusion and dismay.He might be expected to feel ex-ultation.He experienced only fright.It is precisely the same with the liberated colt.
The train pulled into a bustling station,in which the multitudinous noises were thrown back again from the arched iron roof.The relentless haste of all the people was inexpressibly cruel to the man who looked from the window wondering whither he would go,and if,among all the thousands that made up that vast and throbbing city,he would ever find a friend.
For a moment David longed even for that unmaternal mother who had forgotten him in the hour of his distress;but she had been dead for many years.
The train stopped.Every one got out.
David forced himself to his feet and followed.
He had been driven back into the world.
It would have seemed less terrible to have been driven into a desert.He walked toward the great iron gates,seeing the people and hearing the noises confusedly.
As he entered the space beyond the grating some one caught him by the arm.It was a little middle-aged woman in plain clothes,and with sad gray eyes.
"Is this David?"said she.
He did not speak,but his face answered her.
"I knew you were coming to-day.I've waited all these years,David.You didn't think I believed what you said in that letter did you?This way,David,--this is the way home."
