Page:Steadfast Heart.djvu/158

 Then he explained their rightness in so far as he was concerned. “They didn’t know about me.”

There it was in a sentence—the thing which had weighed him down, the thing which had robbed of joy that time of his life which should have been most joyous. Again Mary Browning caught her breath—and understood something of the boy, of his fight, of what had been required of him. But most clearly of all she understood what his return to Rainbow meant to him.

“Why, Angus,” she said, “you—you were afraid to come back to Rainbow.”

“I had to come,” he said doggedly. “But I am afraid…. They—they will yell ‘murderer’ at me.”

“No, no. Oh, Angus, all that was years and years ago. Everybody will have forgotten.”

“No,” he said with conviction.

“Why did you come back?”

“He was sick…. Somebody had to—run the paper. I had to come.”

He had to come. Nature had given to Mary Browning a love for human beings and an understanding of human beings which helped her in this moment. She was able to understand that Angus’s brief words were but an abbreviation, that they stood for something fine and big and of great promise. She was able to know that they gave the keynote of the boy’s