“I promised, when he died, that I would go in and take a last look for him,” he said.  “He loved this place.  Do you want to go with me?”

She drew a deep breath.  “Yes.”

The key opened the door that entered on the veranda.  As it swung back, grating on its rusty hinges, they found themselves facing the chill of a cold and lifeless air.  Keith stepped inside.  A glance told him that nothing was changed—­everything was there in that room with the big fireplace, even as he had left it the night he set out to force justice from Judge Kirkstone.  One thing startled him.  On the dust-covered table was a bowl and a spoon.  He remembered vividly how he had eaten his supper that night of bread and milk.  It was the littleness of the thing, the simplicity of it, that shocked him.  The bowl and spoon were still there after four years.  He did not reflect that they were as imperishable as all the other things about; the miracle was that they were there on the table, as though he had used them only yesterday.  The most trivial things in the room struck him deepest, and he found himself fighting hard, for a moment, to keep his nerve.

“He told me about the bowl and the spoon, John Keith did,” he said, nodding toward them.  “He told me just what I’d find here, even to that.  You see, he loved the place greatly and everything that was in it.  It was impossible for him to forget even the bowl and the spoon and where he had left them.”

It was easier after that.  The old home was whispering back its memories to him, and he told them to Mary Josephine as they went slowly from room to room, until John Keith was living there before her again, the John Keith whom Derwent Conniston had run to his death.  It was this thing that gripped her, and at last what was in her mind found voice.

“It wasn’t you who made him die, was it, Derry?  It wasn’t you?”

“No.  It was the law.  He died, as I told you, of a frosted lung.  At the last I would have shared my life with him had it been possible.  McDowell must never know that.  You must never speak of John Keith before him.”

“I—­I understand, Derry.”

“And he must not know that we came here.  To him John Keith was a murderer whom it was his duty to hang.”

She was looking at him strangely.  Never had he seen her look at him in that way.

“Derry,” she whispered.

“Yes?”

“Derry, is John Keith alive?”

He started.  The shock of the question was in his face.  He caught himself, but it was too late.  And in an instant her hand was at his mouth, and she was whispering eagerly, almost fiercely: 

“No, no, no—­don’t answer me, Derry!  Don’t answer me!  I know, and I understand, and I’m glad, glad, glad!  He’s alive, and it was you who let him live, the big, glorious brother I’m proud of!  And everyone else thinks he’s dead.  But don’t answer me, Derry, don’t answer me!”