“And—­and,” he continued, with some hesitation, “probably I shall not return to this mission.”

“Perhaps that will be best,” she said, simply, but looking up at him now, with a face full of tender sympathy.

“I am sure of it,” he replied, turning away from her gaze.  “The fact is, doctor, I am a little hipped—­overworked, and all that.  I shall pull myself together with a little rest.  But I wanted to tell you how much I appreciate your work, and—­and what a comfort you have been to me in my poor labors.  I used to hope that some time you would see this world in relation to the other, and—­”

“Yes, I know,” she interrupted, hastily, “I cannot think as you do, but—­” And she could not go on for a great lump in her throat.  Involuntarily she rose from her seat.  The interview was too trying.  Father Damon rose also.  There was a moment’s painful silence as they looked in each other’s faces.  Neither could trust the voice for speech.  He took her hand and pressed it, and said “God bless you!” and went out, closing the door softly.

A moment after he opened it again and stood on the threshold.  She was in her chair, her head bowed upon her arms on the table.  As he spoke she looked up, and she never forgot the expression of his face.

“I want to say, Ruth”—­he had never before called her by her first name, and his accent thrilled her—­“that I shall pray for you as I pray for myself, and though I may never see you again in this world, the greatest happiness that can come to me in this life will be to hear that you have learned to say Our Father which art in heaven.”

As she looked he was gone, and his last words remained a refrain in her mind that evening and afterwards—­“Our Father which art in heaven” —­a refrain recurring again and again in all her life, inseparable from the memory of the man she loved.

XXII

Along the Long Island coast lay the haze of early autumn.  It was the time of lassitude.  In the season of ripening and decay Nature seemed to have lost her spring, and lay in a sort of delicious languor.  Sea and shore were in a kind of truce, and the ocean south wind brought cool refreshment but no incentive.

From the sea the old brown farmhouse seemed a snug haven of refuge; from the inland road it appeared, with its spreading, sloping roofs, like an ancient sea-craft come ashore, which had been covered in and then embowered by kindly Nature with foliage.  In those days its golden-brown color was in harmony with the ripening orchards and gardens.