Presently she rose, slipped on the red kimono, and, taking a key from the pocket of her gown, stole from the room. She ascended a stairway and unlocked the door of a wide, bare attic where the moonlight poured through a skylight in the roof upon an unfinished statue. In this statue she had begun to fashion, in the imagined figure of Hugh, her conception of the Prodigal Son; not the battered and husk-filled wayfarer of the parable, but a figure of character and pathos, erring through youthful pride and spirit. The unfinished clay no eyes had seen, for those walls bounded her especial domain.
Carefully, one by one, she unwound the wet cloths that swathed the figure. In the streaming radiance of the night, the clay looked white as snow and she a crimson ghost. She passed her fingers lightly over the features. Was the real Hugh's face like that? One day, perhaps, her own eyes would tell her, and she would finish it. Then she might show it to him, but not now.
She replaced the coverings, relocked the door, and went softly down to her bed.
When Hugh went shamefacedly up the stair from the library, the artificial glow that had tingled to his finger-tips had faded. The poise of mind, the certitude of all the faculties of eye and hand that his icy bath had given him, were yielding. The penalties he had dislodged were returning reinforced. He was rapidly becoming drunk.
He groped his way to his room, turned out the light, threw himself fully dressed upon the bed, and slept the deep sleep of deferred intoxication.
On a June day a month later, Harry Sanderson sat in his study, looking out of the window across the dim summer haze of heat, negligently smoking. On the distant hill overlooking the town was the cemetery, flanked by fields of growing corn where sulky, round-shouldered crows quarrelled and pilfered. He could see the long white marl road, bending in a broad curve between clover-stippled meadows, to skirt the willow-green bluff above the river. There, miles away, on the high bank, he could distinguish the railroad bridge, a long black skeleton spanning "the hole," a deep, fish-haunted pool, the deepest spot in the river for fifty miles. From the nearer, elm-shaded streets came the muffled clack of trade and the discordant treble of a huckster, somewhere a trolley-bell was buzzing angrily, and the impudent scream of a blue jay sheared across the monotone. Harry's gaze went past the streets--past the open square, with its chapel spire lifting from a beryl sea of foliage--to a white colonial porch, peering from between aspens that quivered in the tremulous sunlight.