It was dark when I reached home.  Opening the door, I groped my way across the room till I found the lamp and lighted it.  Then I sat down a minute to think.  Two weeks is a very short time, but when you have been over the mountains and back, when you have hovered for days close to the banks of the Styx, when you have huddled for days close to the Shadrack stove, listening to the widow’s stories of her John and Tip’s praise of his wife, then a fortnight seems an age.  But everything was as I had left it.  Even the pen leaned against the inkwell and the scraps of paper littered the floor where I had tossed them that morning, when Tip and I started over the mountain.  Those scraps were part of the letter I did not send to Mary.  They flashed to me the thought of the one I had sent, and of the answer I never expected.  It was foolish to look, but I had told her to slip her note under the door, if she did send it, and I was taking no chances.  Seizing the lamp, I hobbled to the kitchen, and laughing to myself at the whole absurd proceeding, leaned over and swept the floor with the light.

Right on the sill it lay, a small white envelope!  I did not waste time hobbling back to my chair and the table.  I sat right down on the floor with the lamp at my side, and tore open the note and read it.

“Dear Mark.  Please come to me.”

That was all she said.  It was enough.  It was all I wanted in the world.

Once I had been disappointed, but now there was no mistaking it.  Upside down, backward and forward I read it, right side up and criss-cross, rubbing my eyes a half a hundred times, but there was her appeal—­no question of it.  After all, all was well.  And when Mary calls I must go, even if I have crossed two mountains and am supperless.  All the bitterness had gone.  All those days of brooding were forgotten, for I could go again up the road, my white road, to the hill, and the light there would burn for me.

Then Tim came!

[Illustration:  Then Tim came.]

I was still sitting on the floor when he came, reading the note over and over, with the lamp beside me.

With Captain and Colonel at his heels he burst in upon me.

“Well, Mark, you scoundrel,” he cried, laughing, as he caught me by the arm and lifted me up.  “Where have you been?”

“Travelling,” I answered grimly.  “And you—­what are you doing here?”

“I came to find you,” he said.  “Do you suppose you can disappear off the face of the earth for two weeks and that I will not be worried?  Why, I came from New York to hunt you up—­just got here this afternoon and was over at Bolum’s when we saw the light.  Now give an account of yourself.”

“It isn’t necessary,” said I, smiling complacently.  I put the lamp on the table and picked up my hat.  “I’ll be back in a while,” I said.  “I’m going up to see Mary.”

“To see Mary?” Tim cried.