BETWEEN LAURA AND GERTY

Did he possess the strength as well as the love that she needed?  Adams asked himself a little later as he walked back under the stars.  He saw her as he had just left her—­wan, despairing; so bloodless that the light seemed shining through her features, and then he remembered the radiant smile which she had lost, the glorious womanhood obscured now by humiliation.  An assurance, in which there was almost exultation, flooded his thoughts, and he was aware that the passion he felt for her had been suddenly strengthened by an emotion of equal power—­by the longing born in his heart to afford protection to whatever suffered within his sight.

Never for an instant, since he had entered the room where she retreated before him, had he doubted either his appointed mission or his power of renewal.  His whole experience, he understood now, had directed him to this hour which he had not foreseen, and the worldly success for which he had once struggled meant to him at last only that he might bring hope where there was failure.  Even Connie—­her love, her tragic history, her pitiable reliance upon him at the end—­showed to him in the aspect of a human revelation—­for his fuller understanding of Connie had confirmed him in the patience by which alone he might win back Laura to the happiness which she had lost.

The road stretching ahead of him was no longer obscured, but shone faintly luminous out of the surrounding darkness.  Not the future alone but the desert places through which he had come had blossomed, and the beauty which was revealed to him at last was the beauty in all things that have form or being—­in the earth no less than in the sky, in the flesh no less than in the spirit, for were not earth and flesh, after all, only sky and spirit in the making?  The perfect plan, he had learned, in the end, is not for any part but for the whole.

Across the ferry, he found a cab which took him to Gerty’s house, and in response to his message, she came down immediately, looking excited and perturbed, in an evening gown of black and silver.

“Have you brought me news of Laura?” she asked breathlessly.  “Perry’s dragging me to a dinner, but if she’s ill, I can’t go—­I won’t.”

“Don’t go,” he answered, “she’s not ill, but if she were it would be better.  Will you come with me now and bring her back with you?”

Without replying to his question, she ran from the room and returned, in a moment, wearing a hat and a long coat which covered her black and silver dress.

“The carriage is waiting now,” she said, “we can take it and let Perry go to his dinner in a cab.”

“But—­good Lord, Gerty—­what am I to say to them?” demanded Perry while he shook hands with Adams.  “I never could make up an excuse in my life, you know.”

Then his eyes blinked rapidly and he fell back with merely a muttered protest, for Gerty shone, at the instant, with a beauty which neither he nor Adams had ever seen in her before.  The wonderful child quality softened her look, and they watched her soul bloom in her face like a closed flower that expands in sunlight.