The dusk crept closer to them, the wings of night waved nearer and nearer, and Mabella, resting in Lanty’s arms, sought his eyes for all light, and as they stood thus two other pairs of eyes watched them.
When Mabella had disappeared so promptly after supper, suspicion had stirred uneasily in Vashti’s heart.
“Do you want me to help with the dishes?” she asked Temperance; “Mabella seems to have gotten herself out of sight.”
“No,” said Temperance, who was expecting Nathan, “I’ll finish up that handful of dishes and everything else there is to do in half an hour.”
Vashti betook herself to the garden expecting to find Mabella and Sidney there.
Sidney, so soon as Vashti’s personal influence was disturbed by the presence of others, fell again into a chaos of self-communings, and the devil which lurked there drove him forth into the wilderness; walking with the hopeless desire of escaping from himself he, ere long, found he was amid the barrenness of Mullein meadow. He wandered up and down amid its grotesque boulders till suddenly there came to him a sense of trespass.
“Put off thy shoes from off thy feet for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground,” his intuitions whispered to him. He raised his eyes—looked out from his own heart and saw Lanty with Mabella within his arms, her eyes raised to his radiant with the ineffable trust of first love. Sidney stood spellbound, his heart aching within him. How sorely he envied the title-deeds to this enchanted country they had found, and possessed by divine right. Surely that meek man Moses endured sore agony as, foot-weary after long wandering, he looked upon the promised land, and looked only. It is indeed bitter to look at happiness through another man’s eyes.
Sidney lingered some little time, till of their sacred talk one syllable came to him clearly; then he realized the sacrilege of listening, and departed; but surely the sky was very dark towards which he turned. Yet as he searched the sombre clouds before him the needle-like rays of a tiny star shone out environed by the darkness, and Sidney lighted a little lamp of hope at its beam.
When Vashti found the garden empty as last year’s nests she never paused, but turning fled up to the little garret cupola whose windowed sides gave a view for a long distance in every direction, and hardly had she climbed to this eyrie before she saw two figures in Mullein meadow.
