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, followed by Isabel saying last fond words to her mother as the convalescent closed the door.

“Good-night!” she called back.

In one great wave the young man’s passion rolled over its bounds and brought him to his knees with arms outstretched.  “Oh, Isabel!” he murmured.  “Oh, my God!  Oh, Isabel!  Isabel! if I had but lost you fairly!”

The two slight figures came daintily along the wet path in single file, the maid throwing the lantern’s beams hither and yon as she looked back to answer Isabel’s kindly questions; Isabel one moment half lost in the gloom of the trees, and then so lighted up again from foot to brow that it was easy to see the very lines of her winsome mouth, ripe for compassion or fortitude, yet wishful as a little child’s.

Her secret observer moaned as he stood erect.  The fury of his soul seemed to enhance his stature.  He did not speak again, but, “Oh, Isabel! harder to strive against than all the world beside!” was the unuttered cry that wrote itself upon his tortured brow.  “If your unfair winner would only hold you by fair means!  Yet I too was to blame!  I too was to blame, and you alone were blameless!”

Opposite his window Isabel ceased her light talk with the maid, halted, bent, and scanned something just off the firm path, in the clean wet sand.