She lit her candle and wrote another letter, of the
shortest. It contained but these few words:
“Oh, please forgive me! Come back and forgive.
Oh, you must!—SYLVIA.”
And having written them, Sylvia stole quietly down-stairs,
let herself out at the door and posted them.
Two nights afterward she leaned out of her window
at midnight, wondering whether by the morrow’s
post she would receive an answer to her message.
And while she wondered she understood that the answer
would not come that way. For suddenly in the
moonlit road beneath her, she saw standing the one
who was to send it. Chayne had brought his answer
himself. For a moment she distrusted her own
eyes, believing that her thoughts had raised this
phantom to delude her. But the figure in the road
moved beneath her window and she heard his voice call
to her:
“Sylvia! Sylvia!”
THE SHADOW IN THE ROOM
Sylvia raised her hand suddenly, enjoining silence,
and turned back into the room. She had heard
a door slam violently within the house; and now from
the hall voices rose. Her father and Walter Hine
were coming up early to-night from the library, and
it seemed in anger. At all events Walter Hine
was angry. His voice rang up the stairway shrill
and violent.
“Why do you keep it from me? I will have
it, I tell you. I am not a child,” and
an oath or two garnished the sentences.
Sylvia heard her father reply with the patronage which
never failed to sting the vanity of his companion,
which was the surest means to provoke a quarrel, if
a quarrel he desired.
“Go to bed, Wallie! Leave such things to
Archie Parminter! You are too young.”
His voice was friendly, but a little louder than he
generally used, so that Sylvia clearly distinguished
every word; so clearly indeed, that had he wished
her to hear, thus he would have spoken. She heard
the two men mount the stairs, Hine still protesting
with the violence which had grown on him of late;
Garratt Skinner seeking apparently to calm him, and
apparently oblivious that every word he spoke inflamed
Walter Hine the more. She had a fear there would
be blows—blows struck, of course, by Hine.
She knew the reason of the quarrel. Her father
was depriving Hine of his drug. They passed up-stairs,
however, and on the landing above she heard their
doors close. Then coming back to the window she
made a sign to Chayne, slipped a cloak about her shoulders
and stole quietly down the dark stairs to the door.
She unlocked the door gently and went out to her lover.
Upon the threshold she hesitated, chilled by a fear
as to how he would greet her. But he turned to
her and in the moonlight she saw his face and read
it. There was no anger there. She ran toward
him.
“Oh, my dear,” she cried, in a low, trembling
voice, and his arms enclosed her. As she felt
them hold her to him, and knew indeed that it was
he, her lover, whose lips bent down to hers, there
broke from her a long sigh of such relief and such
great uplifting happiness as comes but seldom, perhaps
no more than once, in the life of any man or woman.
Her voice sank to a whisper, and yet was very clear
and, to the man who heard it, sweet as never music
was.
