lse."

"Oh, it would be glorious--glorious!" Mrs. Trott dried her eyes on her
apron. "As for Tilly, Tilly--it may seem to you a strange idea of mine,
John, but somehow I believe, actually believe that she would accept the
money from you as readily as she'd give her last cent to you under the
same circumstances. She is a strange, strange little woman, more of the
next life, it seems to me, than this. She has been an angel of light to
me and I couldn't leave her; even if you were an emperor offering me a
throne I'd stay here. In taking your money, John, I am taking it on her
account. She will see through your plan, but it will only make her the
happier, for she thinks your soul and hers are united for all time, and
it may be so, John--it may be so. Love like yours and hers ought not to
die. How could it?"

He sat silent. All the morbid hauntings of his past seemed to be
withdrawing like shadows before some vast supernal light. His body felt
imponderable. A delicious pain clutched his throat and pierced his
breast. He was ashamed of his weakness and tried to shake it off, but it
continued to thrill and sob in every nook and cranny of his hitherto
unexplored being. The woman before him seemed more than mere flesh,
blood, and bone. A veritable nimbus hovered over her transfigured head
and shone against the unbarked logs behind her.

CHAPTER XIII

By choice, he started home through the wood. He wanted the feel of the
grass, heather, and moss beneath his feet; the scent of wild flowers in
his nostrils; the bending boughs of great trees over him; the minute
sounds of insects in his ears; the flight of winged things in his sight.
Deeper and deeper into the wood he plunged. There seemed something to be
drunken like an impalpable spiritual elixir. He held out the arms of his
being to it; he opened the pores of his body and soul to it. The far-off
hum of the town's commerce and traffic seemed an insistent denial of the
intangible thing for which he hungered, and he closed his ears to it.
Presently he heard the sound of breaking twigs and the stirring of dry
leaves behind the vines and boulders close by on his right, and he
paused to listen. Then there fell upon his ears the soft voices of
children, and, carefully parting the pliant branches of some willows, he
saw in a little grassy glade Tilly's daughter and son. They were
gathering flowers and ferns. Little Tilly had her chubby arms full, and
Joel was plucking more.