When she came, fresh as the morning, bareheaded, her beautiful hair done up in a club behind, into the little field, and he tried to call to her, his tongue was dry and he could utter no sound. Accidentally he dropped his stick, which clattered down the bars of the gate. She laughed. He entered the enclosure.
"I knew I should find you there," she cried, and sped toward him.
"'By the pricking of my thumb,'" she quoted gaily; and then, as he took both her outstretched hands, she drew near him and whispered: "and by the beating of my heart."
His arms folded around her and he held her tight against him, stupefied, dazed, throbbing, vainly trying to find words. At last he said huskily:
"God has sent you to be the joy and comfort of a sorely stricken man. I accept it because it is His will. I will cherish you as no man has ever cherished woman before. My love for you, my dear, is as infinite--as infinite--oh, God!"
Speech failed him. He tore his arms away from her and fell sobbing at her feet and kissed the skirts of her gown.
The Divine Mercy, as Jeremy puts it, thought fit to remove Aunt Wotherspoon to a happier world before the week was out; and so, within a month, Jeremy led his blind bride into the little Tudor house. And then began for him a happiness so exquisite that sometimes he was afraid to breathe lest he should disturb the enchanted air. Every germ of love and tenderness that had lain undeveloped in his nature sprang into flower. Sometimes he grew afraid lest, in loving her, he was forgetting God. But he reassured himself by a pretty sophistry. "O Lord," says he, "it is Thou only that I worship--through Thine own great gift." And indeed what more could be desired by a reasonable Deity?
Barbara, responsive, gave him her love in full. From the first she would hear nothing of his maimed visage.
"My dear," she said as they wandered one golden autumn day by the riverside, "I have made a picture of you out of your voice, the plash of water, the sunset and the summer air. 'Twas thus that my heart saw you the first evening we met. And that is more than sufficing for a poor, blind creature whom a gallant gentleman married out of charity."
"Charity!" His voice rose in indignant repudiation.