“You must keep up your strength, my dear girl,” she urged, when Charlotte faltered over the food.  “It’s a long way between now and the time when it will be all over.  We may be delayed a day or two in getting off, and delayed all the way down.  I hear this storm is raging all over the country.”

Her words proved true.  It was two days before the little party could be off.  During that time Charlotte was overwhelmed with attention from her neighbours.  The Macauleys and Chesters could not do enough.  Either Winifred or Martha was constantly with her, and their presence was not ungrateful.  John Leaver came and went upon errands, never seeing Charlotte alone, but making no effort to do so, conveying to her by his look or the grasp of his hand the comradeship which she felt more convincingly with every passing hour.  His personality seemed somehow as vital and stirring as the course of a clear stream in a desert place.

At the short, private service which preceded the departure of the party for the train, he came and took his place beside her in a quiet way which had in it the quality of a right.  Although he did not touch or speak to her the sense of his near presence was to her like a strong supporting arm.  When the moment came to leave the room she heard his whisper in her ear and felt his hand upon her arm: 

“Courage!  You are not going alone, you know.”

It went to her heart.  On the threshold she suddenly looked up at him through her veil, and met in return such a look as a woman may lean upon.  Her heart throbbed wildly in response, throbbed as only a sad heart may when it realizes that there is to be balm for its wounds.

All through the long journey Charlotte felt Leaver’s constant support, although he made no further effort to define the relation between them, even when for a short space, now and then, the two were alone together.  Instead he talked of his hurried trip abroad with the Burnses, and once, when they were pacing up and down a platform, at a long stop, he told her of his visit to a certain noted specialist in Berlin.

“I had had a breakdown in my work last spring,” he said, in a quite simple way, as if he were speaking of something unimportant.  “I had made up my mind that I could never hope fully to recover from its effects.  Dr. Z——­ told me that I was perfectly recovered, that I was as sound, mentally and physically, as I had ever been, and that, if I used ordinary common sense in the future about vacations at reasonable intervals, there was no reason why the experience should ever be repeated.  This assurance was what sent me home.  I found I couldn’t stay in Germany and go sightseeing with my friends after that.  I wanted to be at work again.”

“I wonder that Dr. Burns didn’t want to rush home with you,” Charlotte observed—­though it was not of Red Pepper she was thinking.  This simple statement, she knew, was the explanation he was giving her of the thing he had said to her last August under her apple-tree.  It made clear to her that which she had suspected before—­it somehow seemed, also, to take away the last barrier between them.