both been waiting for this very moment all their lives.
Margaret was quite motionless, her head very high, dark eyes on his face steadily, gravely, as if the wonder and richness of her emotion were too great to be carried off lightly. Ned took another step forward, a movement that brought her still outstretched arms to his shoulders, upon which her light palms dropped tenderly.
“Margie! Then it is true? You love me?”
He swept her into his embrace; her arms met about his neck and he felt her hands caressing his hair. Sudden self-consciousness fell upon them and they drew back into the shade of the walnut lest they be observed from the house.
2
With such careless haste that the chessmen were tossed hither and thither, Father Rooney sprang from his chair and across the room.
“What ails our little girl?” cried the old priest, deeply disturbed.
Dr. Sloane got out of his chair with more difficulty; sciatica had made a semi-invalid of him for months. He joined the other man who leaned over Clare. The blond head lay on outstretched arms across the window-sill. So motionless was she that for a terrible moment her father felt the clutching fear which his love for the daughter so like his dead wife made more terrible.
The priest held a listening ear against the girl’s side. “She lives, old friend. Her heart is beating—but sluggishly. Let me carry her to the divan, where she will be more comfortable. It is only a fainting spell.”
Father Rooney knew well the name of the fear that was lifting a grisly head in his friend’s breast, and his heart ached for the old doctor, who followed him haltingly and painfully as he carried the limp little form across the room and disposed it on the broad divan. Sitting beside her, the priest began to stroke Clare’s hands softly, while her father held a bottle of salts under her nose.
The lame girl stirred feebly. Then suddenly she broke out into hysterical sobbing, so heart-racking and so pitiful that tears rose to the eyes of the old priest who had seen so much, heard so much, of human suffering, that one felt he must have grown hardened by it. Now, however, he sat stroking a limp, cold hand, and hot tears slowly formed in his eyes and dropped upon it.
He loved Clare as though she had been his own child. Hers was a rare soul that knew and appreciated the lofty truths in his church just as she recognized and loved the same unchangeable truths that formed the foundation of the faith of her fathers. For so young a girl (she was only nineteen) Clare possessed a lucidity of thought and a fairness of judgment that made her especially interesting to the good priest, who secretly believed her one of God’s favored souls.
“She has never been like this before,” worried Dr. Sloane, wrinkled brow troubled. “Clare, dear! Clare! It’s Dad calling you, dear. Clare!”
The girl’s sobbing increased in intensity. Her body began to writhe on the divan as if in sharp agony. The priest in Father Rooney lifted an attentive ear to the undertones of this sobbing that somehow fell strangely upon that clerical ear; he felt intuitively that here was a matter of soul trouble, not a mere hysterical weakness on Clare’s part, and he was deeply disturbed.
Suddenly he looked up sharply and threw a searching glance about the room. His eye met that of Dr. Sloane, who had also looked about quickly.
“I would have sworn that there was someone else in. the room just Now,” said the doctor in a puzzled
