IT was one of those little ironies of fate that are spoken about so much, that when Warren Reyburn alighted from the train in Tinsdale Abijah Gage should be supporting one corner of the station, and contributing a quid now and then to the accumulations of the week scattered all about his feet.

He spotted the stranger at once and turned his cunning little eyes upon him, making it obvious that he was bulging with information.  It was, therefore, quite natural, when Reyburn paused to take his bearings, that Bi should speak up and inquire if he was looking for some one.  Reyburn shook his head and passed on, but Bi was not to be headed off so easily as that.  He shuffled after him: 

“Say!” he said, pointing to a shackley horse and buckboard that stood near, belonging to a pal over at the freight house.  “Ef you want a lift I’ll take you along.”

“Thank you, no,” said Reyburn, smiling; “I’m not going far.”

“Say!” said Bi again as he saw his quarry about to disappear.  “You name ain’t Bains, is it?”

“No!” said Reyburn, quite annoyed by the persistent old fellow.

“From New York?” he hazarded cheerfully.

“No,” answered Reyburn, turning to go.  “You must excuse me.  I’m in a hurry.”

“That’s all right,” said Bi contentedly.  “I’ll walk a piece with you.  I was lookin’ fer a doctor to take down to see a sick child.  A doctor from New York.  You ain’t by any chance a doctor, are you?” Bi eyed the big leather bag inquiringly.

“No,” said Reyburn, laughing in spite of his annoyance.  “I’m only a lawyer.”  And with a bound he cleared the curb and hurried off down the street, having now recognized the direction described in Jane’s diagram of Tinsdale.

Abijah Gage looked after him with twinkling eyes of dry mirth, and slowly sauntered after him, watching him until he entered the little unpainted gate of the Carson house and tapped at the old gray door.  Then Bi lunged across the street and entered a path that ran along the railroad track for a few rods, curving suddenly into a stretch of vacant lots.  On a convenient fence rail with a good outlook toward the west end of the village he ensconced himself and set about whittling a whistle from some willow stalks.  He waited until he saw Bobbie Carson hurry off toward Hathaway’s house and return with Lizzie Hope; waited hopefully until the stranger finally came out of the house again, touching his hat gracefully to the girl as she stood at the open door.  Then he hurried back to the station again, and was comfortably settled on a tub of butter just arrived by freight, when Reyburn reached there.  He was much occupied with his whistle, and never seemed to notice, but not a movement of the stranger escaped him, and when the Philadelphia express came by, and the stranger got aboard the parlor car, old Bi Gage swung his lumbering length up on the back platform of the last car.  The hounds were hot on the trail now.

It was several years since Bi Gage had been on so long a journey, but he managed to enjoy the trip, and kept in pretty good touch with the parlor car, although he was never in evidence.  If anybody had told Warren Reyburn as he let himself into his apartment late that night that he was being followed, he would have laughed and told them it was an impossibility.  When he came out to the street the next morning and swung himself into a car that would land him at his office, he did not see the lank flabby figure of the toothless Bi standing just across the block, and keeping tab on him from the back platform, nor notice that he slid into the office building behind him and took the same elevator up, crowding in behind two fat men and effacing himself against the wall of the cage.  Reyburn was reading his paper, and did not look up.  The figure slid out of the elevator after him and slithered into a shadow, watching him, slipping softly after, until sure which door he took, then waited silently until sure that the door was shut.  No one heard the slouching footsteps come down the marble hall.  Bi Gage always wore rubbers when he went anywhere in particular.  He had them on that morning.  He took careful note of the name on the door:  “Warren Reyburn, Attorney-at-Law,” and the number.  Then he slid down the stairs as unobserved as he had come, and made his way to a name and number on a bit of paper from his pocket which he consulted in the shelter of a doorway.

When Warren Reyburn started on his first trip to Tinsdale his mind was filled with varying emotions.  He had never been able to quite get away from the impression made upon him by that little white bride lying so still amid her bridal finery, and the glowering bridegroom above her.  It epitomized for him all the unhappy marriages of the world, and he felt like starting out somehow in hot pursuit of that bridegroom and making him answer for the sadness of his bride.  Whenever the matter had been brought to his memory he had always been conscious of the first gladness he had felt when he knew she had escaped.  It could not seem to him anything but a happy escape, little as he knew about any of the people who played the principal parts in the little tragedy he had witnessed.

Hour after hour as he sat in the train and tried to sleep or tried to think he kept wondering at himself that he was going on this “wild goose chase,” as he called it in his innermost thoughts.  Yet he knew he had to go.  In fact, he had known it from the moment James Ryan had shown him the advertisement.  Not that he had ever had any idea of trying for that horrible reward.  Simply that his soul had been stirred to its most knightly depths to try somehow to protect her in her hiding.  Of course, it had been a mere crazy thought then, with no way of fulfilment, but when the chance had offered of really finding her and asking if there was anything she would like done, he knew from the instant it was suggested that he was going to do it, even if he lost every other business chance he ever had or expected to have, even if it took all his time and every cent he could borrow.  He knew he had to try to find that girl!  The thought that the only shelter between her and the great awful world lay in the word of an untaught girl like Jane Carson filled him with terror for her.  If that was true, the sooner some one of responsibility and sense got to her the better.  The questions he had asked of various people that afternoon had revealed more than he had already guessed of the character of the bridegroom to whom he had taken such a strong dislike on first sight.

Thus he argued the long night through between the fitful naps he caught when he was not wondering if he should find her, and whether he would know her from that one brief sight of her in church.  How did he know but this was some game put up on him to get him into a mix-up?  He must go cautiously, and on no account do anything rash or make any promises until he had first found out all about her.

When morning dawned he was in a state of perturbation quite unusual for the son and grandson of renowned lawyers noted for their calmness and poise under all circumstances.  This perhaps was why the little incident with Abijah Gage at the station annoyed him so extremely.  He felt he was doing a questionable thing in taking this journey at all.  He certainly did not intend to reveal his identity or business to this curious old man.

The little gray house looked exactly as Jane had described it, and as he opened the gate and heard the rusty chain that held it clank he had a sense of having been there before.

He was pleasantly surprised, however, when the door was opened by Emily, who smiled at him out of shy blue eyes, and stood waiting to see what he wanted.  It was like expecting a viper and finding a flower.  Somehow he had not anticipated anything flower-like in Jane’s family.  The mother, too, was a surprise when she came from her ironing, and, pushing her wavy gray hair back from a furrowed brow lifted intelligent eyes that reminded him of Jane, to search his face.  Ma did not appear flustered.  She seemed to be taking account of him and deciding whether or not she would be cordial to him.

“Yes, I had a telegram from Jane this morning,” she was scanning his eyes once more to see whether there was a shadow of what she called “shiftiness” in them.  “Come in,” she added grudgingly.

He was not led into the dining-room, but seated on one of the best varnished chairs in the “parlor,” as they called the little unused front room.  He felt strangely ill at ease and began to be convinced that he was on the very wildest of wild goose chases.  To think of expecting to find Elizabeth Stanhope in a place like this!  If she ever had been here she certainly must have flown faster than she had from the church on her wedding night.

So, instead of beginning as he had planned, to put a list of logically prepared keen questions to a floundering and suspecting victim, he found the clear eyes of Ma looking into his unwaveringly and the wise tongue of Ma putting him through a regular orgy of catechism before she would so much as admit that she had ever heard of a girl named Lizzie Hope.  Then he bethought him of her daughter’s letter and handed it over for her to read.

“Well,” she admitted at last, half satisfied, “she isn’t here at present.  I sent her away when I found you was comin’.  I wasn’t sure I’d let you see her at all if I didn’t like your looks.”

“That’s right, Mrs. Carson,” he said heartily, with real admiration in his voice.  “I’m glad she has some one so careful to look out for her.  Your daughter said she was in a good safe place, and I begin to see she knew what she was talking about.”

Then the strong look around Ma’s lips settled into the sweeter one, and she sent Bob after the girl.

“Are you a friend of hers?” she asked, watching him keenly.

“No,” said Reyburn.  “I’ve never seen her but once.  She doesn’t know me at all.”

“Are you a friend of her-family?”

“Oh, no!”

“Or any of her friends or relations?” Ma meant to be comprehensive.

“No.  I’m sorry I am not.  I am a rather recent comer to the city where she made her home, I understand.”

Ma looked at him thoughtfully for a moment.  It wouldn’t have been called a stare, it was too kindly for that, but Reyburn thought to himself that he would not have liked to have borne her scrutiny if he had anything to conceal, for he felt as if she might read the truth in his eyes.

“Are you-please excuse me for askin’-but are you a member of any church?”

Reyburn flushed, and wanted to laugh, but was embarrassed in spite of himself: 

“Why, yes-I’m a member,” he said slowly, then with a frank lifting of his eyes to her troubled gaze, “I united with the church when I was a mere kid, but I’m afraid I’m not much of a member.  I really am not what you’d call ‘working’ at it much nowadays.  I go to morning service sometimes, but that’s about all.  I don’t want to be a hypocrite.”

He wondered as he spoke why he took the trouble to answer the woman so fully.  Her question was in a way impertinent, much like the way her daughter talked.  Yet she seemed wholly unconscious of it.

“I know,” she assented sorrowfully.  “There’s lots of them in the church.  We have ’em, too, even in our little village.  But still, after all, you can’t help havin’ confidence more in them that has ‘named the name’ than in them that has not.”

Reyburn looked at her curiously and felt a sudden infusion of respect for her.  She was putting the test of her faith to him, and he knew by the little stifled sigh that he had been found wanting.

“I s’pose lawyers don’t have much time to think about being Christians,” she apologized for him.

He felt impelled to be frank with her: 

“I’m afraid I can’t urge that excuse.  Unfortunately I have a good deal of time on my hands now.  I’ve just opened my office and I’m waiting for clients.”

“Where were you before that?  You did not just get through studying?”

He saw she was wondering whether he was wise enough to help her protege.

“No, I spent the last three years in France.”

“Up at the front?” The pupils of her eyes dilated eagerly.

“Yes, in every drive,” he answered, wondering that a woman of this sort should be so interested now that the war was over.

“And you came back safe!” she said slowly, looking at him with a kind of wistful sorrow in her eyes.  “My boy was shot the first day he went over the top.”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” said Reyburn gently, a sudden tightness in his throat.

“But it was all right.”  She flashed a dazzling smile at him through the tears that came into her eyes.  “It wasn’t as if he wasn’t ready.  Johnny was always a good boy, an’ he joined church when he was fourteen, an’ always kep’ his promises.  He used to pray every night just as faithful, an’ read his Bible.  I’ve got the little Testament he carried all through.  His chaplain sent it to me.  It’s got a bullet hole through it, and blood-marks, but it’s good to me to look at, ’cause I know Johnny’s with his Saviour.  He wasn’t afraid to die.  He said to me before he left, he says:  ‘Ma, if anythin’ happens to me it’s all right.  You know, Ma, I ain’t forgettin’ what you taught me, an’ I ain’t forgettin’ Christ is with me.’”

Mrs. Carson wiped her eyes furtively, and tried to look cheerful.  Reyburn wished he knew how to comfort her.

“It makes a man feel mean,” he said at last, trying to fit his toe into the pattern of the ingrain carpet, “to come home alive and whole when so many poor fellows had to give their lives.  I’ve often wondered how I happened to get through.”

She looked at him tenderly: 

“Perhaps your Heavenly Father brought you back to give you more chance to do things for Him, an’ get ready to die when your time comes.”

There was something startling to this self-composed city chap in hearing a thing like this from the lips of the mother whose beloved son was gone forever beyond her teaching but had “been ready.”  Reyburn looked at her steadily, soberly, and then with a queer constriction in his throat he looked down at the floor thoughtfully and said: 

“Perhaps He did.”

“Well, I can’t help bein’ glad you’re a church member, anyhow,” said Mrs. Carson, rising to look out of the window.  “She needs a Christian to help her, an’ I’d sooner trust a Christian.  If you really meant it when you joined church you’ve got somethin’ to fall back on anyhow.  Here she comes.  I’ll just go an’ tell her you’re in here.”