"Father," I replied in a voice as firm as his own. "Father, I have done no wrong."
Once more he looked steadily into my eyes and through them down into my very soul. "Phil, I believe you. These things will soon pass away."
In the early twilight I went for the last time to "Rockport." There are sadder things than funeral rites. The tragedies of life do not always ring down the curtain leaving the stage strewn with the forms of the slain. Oftener they find the living actor following his lines and doing his part of the play as if all life were a comedy. The man of sixty years may smile at the intensity of feeling in the boy of twenty-one, but that makes it no easier for the boy. I watched the sun go down that night, and then I waited through the dark hour till the moon, now past the full, should once more illumine the Neosho Valley. Although I have always been a lover of nature, that sunset and the purple twilight following, the darkness of the early evening hour and the glorious moonrise are tinged with a sorrow I have never quite lost even in the happier years since then. I sat alone on the point of rock. At last the impulse to go down below and search for a letter from Marjie overcame me, although I laughed bitterly at the folly of such a notion. In the crevice where her letter had been placed for me the night before, I found nothing. What a different story I might have to tell had I gone down at sunset instead of waiting through that hour of darkness before the moon crept above the eastern horizon line! And yet I believe that in the final shaping-up the best thing for each one comes to all of us. Else the universe is without a plan and Love unwavering and eternal is only a vagary of the dreamer.
Early the next morning I left Springvale, and set my face to the westward, as John Baronet had done a decade and a half before, to begin life anew where the wilderness laps the frontier line. My father held my hand long when I said good-bye, and love and courage and trust were all in that hand-clasp.
"You'll win out, my boy. Keep your face to the light. The world has no place for the trifler, the coward, or the liar. It is open to homestead claims for all the rest. You will not fail." And with his kiss on my forehead he let me go.