Page:Stanwood Pier--The ancient grudge.djvu/486

Rh Lydia came to see him, when he was able to sit up; she stayed an hour, talking with him about Stewart. Floyd told her how Stewart had died with the unselfish whisper on his lips; it was a detail that she had not known before, and only when Floyd's voice broke in describing it did the tears come into her eyes.

"Ah," she said, "that was my Stewart!"

Floyd understood the triumphant vindication in her repressed cry.

"I was misjudging him," he confessed. "I must always reproach myself, Lydia—I don't know whether he ever told you, but I got so bitter against Stewart that sitting opposite him in a car one day I wouldn't speak. I thought he'd deliberately turned demagogue and was trying to wreck everything—in spite and revenge. I thought so all the more when I learned he'd gone out to give the alarm about the watchmen. But that night, the moment I saw him in the crowd, looking at that fellow under the freight ear, I knew I'd misjudged him. It was in his face—awe-struck, sort of frightened; there was nothing cruel in Stewart; I ought to have remembered that. It was just that he had this theoretical interest in causes and people that he knew nothing about—and he took up with them with a child's enthusiasm—and played their game for them as hard as he could, making every point count—but always as a game, never thinking where or how it might end—and then, that night, when he stood in the presence of the fact, when he saw the testing of his theories, he looked stricken, Lydia, stricken—for there was never any cruelty in Stewart. And that cry of his when they began to stone me, 'Ah, don't!'—it rings in my ears—it was so heart-broken—such a prayer! I did n't do justice to Stewart."

"If he could only have lived long enough for me to get to his side and unsay the last words I spoke to him!" Lydia murmured. "His wife did not do justice to him either, Floyd. But his little boy—who never can re-