Page:Rideout--Beached keels.djvu/233

Rh light shining upward on the gentle face and the sad gray eyes. It was all very distant, and belonged not to him; but at all events the vision was there.

"She'd understand even this," he thought. "Whether she ever forgave it or not, she knows what's been fighting in my veins. That's as much as a man deserves."

Through the trilling of the crickets and the soft patter of the leaves came the sound of a frog chunking away among the rushes of the little marsh behind the knoll, croaking his song, older than Aristophanes. Marden did not hear it, but he saw the ancient star hung in the east, and under the Great Bear the ghostly play of the Northern Lights, shifting in long faint streamers across the sky, showing a handiwork beyond all understanding.

He stood lost in wonder, filled with a grief as old as sea and land. Then he slowly faced about.

A light was coming from the village.

"The house," he said aloud, "it does n't matter now what happens to that, either."

The light came bobbing across the field.