With the Farley stock in his pocket Tom took a room at the Marlboro and spent the remainder of that day, and all the days of the fortnight following, wrestling mightily with the lawyers in winding up the tangled skein of Chiawassee affairs.  Propped in his bed at Warwick Lodge, the bed he had not left since the night of violence, Duxbury Farley signed everything that was offered to him, and the obstacles to a settlement were vanquished, one by one.

When it was all over, Tom began to draw checks on the small fortune realized from the sale of the patents.  One was to Major Dabney, redeeming his two hundred shares of Chiawassee Limited at par.  Another was to the order of Ardea Dabney, covering the Farley shares at a valuation based on the prosperous period before the crash of ’93.  With this check in his pocket he went home—­for the first time in two weeks.

It was well beyond the Woodlawn dinner-hour before he could muster up the courage to cross the lawns to Deer Trace.  No word had passed between him and Ardea since the September afternoon when he had overtaken her at the church door,—­counting as nothing the effort she had made to speak to him on the night of vengeance.

How would she receive him?  Not too coldly, he hoped.  It was known that Vincent’s assailant in the furnace yard was a stranger; a man who had taken service as a guard:  also that Mr. Gordon—­they gave him his courtesy title now—­had saved Vincent from a terrible death.  Tom thought the rescue should count for something with Ardea.

It did.  She was sitting at the piano in the otherwise deserted music-room when he entered; and she broke a chord in the middle to give him both of her hands, and to say, with eyes shining, as if the rescue were a thing of yesterday: 

“O Tom!  I knew you had it in you!  It was fine!”

“Hold on,” he said, a bit unsteadily.  “There must be no more misunderstandings.  What happened that night three weeks ago, had to happen; and five minutes before it happened I was wondering if I could aim straight enough in the light from the slag-pot to hit him.  And I fully meant to do it.”

She shuddered.

“I—­I was afraid,” she faltered.  “I knew, you know—­Japheth had told me, in—­in justice to you.  That was why I ran across the lawn and called to you.”

The sweet beauty of her laid hold on him and he felt his grip going.  Another word and he would be trespassing again.  To keep from saying it he crossed to the recessed window and sat down in the sleepy-hollow chair which was the Major’s peculiar possession in the music-room.

After a little he said:  “Play something, won’t you?—­something that will make me a little less sorry that I didn’t kill him.”

“The idea!” she said.  But when he settled himself in the big easy-chair as a listener, lying back with his eyes closed and his hands locked over one knee, she turned to the piano and humored him.  When the final chord of the Wanderlied had sung itself asleep, he sat up and nodded approvingly.