Expostulating uselessly, Atchison led the way.  Brown found Andrew Murdison standing with a look of dogged determination on his face, which changed to one of relief when he saw Brown.  Old Benson, the watchmaker, who had been convalescing from illness when Brown came away, had suffered a relapse and had probably but few hours to live.

With a brief leave-taking, in the course of which Brown held for an instant the hand of Helena Forrest and found it cold as ice in his grasp, he went away.  As the train bore him swiftly back to the place he had left so recently, certain words came to him and stayed by him, fitting themselves curiously to the rhythmic roar of the train: 

“God is faithful, who will not suffer you to be tempted above that ye are able; but will with the temptation also make a way to escape, that ye may be able to bear it.”

And the car wheels, as they turned, seemed to be saying, mile after mile:  “A way to escape—­a way to escape—­a way to escape!”

XV

BROWN’S BROWN STUDY

Standing in his kitchen doorway, Brown looked out into his back yard.

It was, in one way, an unusual back yard for that quarter of the city, and in that one way it differed from the back yards of his neighbours.  While theirs were bounded on all sides by high and ugly board fences, his was encompassed by a stone wall standing even higher, and enclosing the small area of possibly forty feet by thirty in a privacy quite unknown elsewhere in the district.  This stone wall had been laid by the Englishman who had built the house, his idea of having things to himself being the product of his early life in a country where not only is every man’s house his castle, but the surrounding ground thereof, as well, his domain, from which he would keep out every curious eye.

It was an evening in mid-April.  Brown had opened the big oak door to let the late western light of the spring day flood his kitchen, while he washed and put away the dishes lately used for his supper—­and for that of a forlorn and ill-used specimen of tramp humanity who had arrived as he was sitting down.

He was presently to address a gathering of factory girls in a near-by schoolhouse; and he was trying, as he stood in the door, with the soft spring air touching gratefully his face, to gather his thoughts together for the coming talk.  But he was weary with a long day’s labours, and somehow his eyes could summon no vision of the faces he was to see.  Instead—­

“There ought to be a garden back here,” he said to himself.  “If I’m to stay here for the coming year—­as it looks as if I must—­I should cultivate this little patch and make it smile a bit.  As it is, it’s doing no good to anybody, not even Bim.  He’s pretty careless about his bones out here, and leaves them around instead of burying ’em decently.  I must teach him better.  This would be a good place to bring the children into, if it had some flowers in it.”