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The Mettle of the Pasture

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him from Berlin; there were other maps from Athens; there was something from the city of Hannibal, and something from Tiber. Indeed, there were not many places in Isabel's wandering from which she had not sent home to him some proof that he was remembered. And always she sent letters which were more than maps or books, being in themselves charts to the movements of her spirit. They were regular; they were frank; they assured him how increasingly she needed his friendship. When she returned, she declared she would settle down to be near him for the rest of life. Few names were mentioned in these letters: never Rowan's; never Mrs. Osborn's--that lifelong friendship having been broken; and in truth since last March young Mrs. Osborn's eyes had been sealed to the reading of all letters. But beneath everything else, he could always trace the presence of one unspoken certainty--that she was passing through the deeps without herself knowing what height or what heath her feet would reach at last, there to abide. As he had walked homeward this afternoon through the dust, something else had drawn his attention: he was passing the Conyers homestead, and already lights were beginning to twinkle in the many windows; there was to be a ball that night, and he thought of the unconquerable woman ruling within, apparently gaining still in vitality and youth. "Unjailed malefactors often attain great ages," he said to himself, as he turned away and thought of the lives she had helped to blight and shorten. As the night advanced, he fell under the influence of his book, was drawn out of his poor house, away from his obscure town, his unknown college, quitted his country and his age, passing backward until there fell around him the glorious dawn of the race before the sunrise of written history: the immortal still trod the earth; the human soldier could look away from his earthly battle-field and see, standing on a mountain crest, the figure and the authority of his Divine Commander. Once more it was the flower-dyed plain, blood-dyed as well; the ships drawn up by the gray, the wrinkled sea; over on the other side, well-built Troy; and the crisis of the long struggle was coming. Hector, of the glancing plume, had come back to the city for the last time, mindful of his end. He read once more through the old scene that is never old, and then put his book aside and sat thoughtful. "_I know not if the gods will not overthrow me. . . . I have very sore shame if, like a coward, I shrink away from battle; moreover mine own soul forbiddeth me. . . . Destiny . . . no man hast escaped, be he coward or be he valiant, when once he hath been born_." His eyes had never rested on any spot in human history, however separated in time and place, where the force of those words did not seem to reign. Whatsoever the names under which men have conceived and worshipped their gods or their God, however much they have believed that it was these or it was He who overthrew them and made their destinies inescapable, after all, it is the high compulsion of the soul itself, the final mystery of personal choice, that sends us forth at last to our struggles and to our peace: "_mine own soul forbiddeth me_"--there for each is right and wrong, the eternal beauty of virtue. He did not notice the sound of approaching wheels, and that the sound ceased at his door. A moment later and Isabel with light footsteps stood before him. He sprang up with a cry and put his arms around her and held her. "You shall never go away again." "No, I am never going away again; I have come back to marry Rowan." These were her first words to him as they sat face to face. And she quickly went on: "How is he?" He shook his head reproachfully at her: "When I saw him at least he seemed better than you seem." "I knew he was not well--I have known it for a long time. But you saw him--in town--on the street--with his friends--attending to business?" "Yes--in town--on the street--with his friends--attending to business." "May I stay here? I ordered my luggage to be sent here." "Your room is ready and has always been ready and waiting since the day you left. I think Anna has been putting fresh flowers in it all autumn. You will find some there to-night. She has insisted of late that you would soon be coming home." An hour later she came down into the library again. She had removed the traces of travel, and she had travelled slowly and was not tired. All this enabled him to see how changed she was; and without looking older, how strangely oldened and grown how quiet of spirit. She had now indeed become sister for him to those images of beauty that were always haunting him--those far, dim images of the girlhood of her sex, with their faces turned away from the sun and their eyes looking downward, pensive in shadow, too freighted with thoughts of their brief fate and their immortality. "I must have a long talk with you before I try to sleep. I must empty my heart to you once." He knew that she needed the relief, and that what she asked of him during these hours would be silence. "I have tried everything, and everything has failed. I have tried absence, but absence has not separated me from him. I have tried silence, but through the silence I have never ceased speaking to him. Nothing has really ever separated us; nothing ever can. It is more than will or purpose, it is my life. It is more than life to me, it is love." She spoke very quietly, and at first she seemed unable to progress very far from the beginning. After every start, she soon came back to that one beginning. "It is of no use to weigh the right and the wrong of it: I tried that at first, and I suppose that is why I made sad mistakes. You must not think that I am acting now from a sense of duty to him or to myself. Duty does not enter into my feeling: it is love; all that I am forbids me to do anything else." But after a while she went back and bared before him in a way the history of her heart. "The morning after he told me, I went to church. I remember the lessons of the day and the hymns, and how I left the church before the sermon, because everything seemed to be on his side, and no one was on mine. He had done wrong and was guilty; and I had been wrong and was innocent; and the church

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