Page:Frank Packard - Greater Love Hath No Man.djvu/277

 ten miles from Hebron, and since afternoon he had walked the rest of the distance. And now? If, after all, the pitiful chance and hope he clung to should be vain! It was so little that he asked—to steal a glimpse of her through the window of the sitting-room perhaps, to hear her laugh, her song float out to him through the night—that was all—just that—and then to go away again. It was so little to ask for, to hope for, the striving for so desperately hard that surely, surely that much would be his.

The night was calm and quiet. Across the fields in front of him the great walls of the penitentiary stood out in black irregular lines in the white moonlight; twinkling lights from the houses dotted the village road; just before him he could distinguish in a dark blur the warden's lawn, the avenue of maples that fringed the driveway. He wondered, a little curiously, a little wistfully, what the house looked like now—the front, of course, would be the same for there the fire had hardly touched it; but the rear—had it been rebuilt just exactly as it was before, or was it changed?—not that it could matter, only it all seemed so intimately a part of her—and this was her home.

He reached the roadside, looked up and down it, listened—then suddenly lay down full length upon the grass. A step crunched on the gravel across the way, and a man turned into the road—it was Warden Rand—and started briskly off in the direction of the village away from the penitentiary. Varge waited until the warden was out of sight and hearing, then he crossed the road quickly, gained the shadows of the maples and, keeping on the edge of the lawn to deaden the sound of