The sight of his face at first startled her, for it was held captive of emotion; but it was an emotion of joy, not of pain. A letter fluttered in his grasp. He thrust it into her hands. "Jessica!" he exclaimed. "Hugh has paid it! He has sent the five thousand dollars, interest and principal, to the bank, to my account." For a moment she stood transfixed. The talk she had mechanically heard leaped into significance, and her mind ran back to the hour when she had left the draft at the cabin. She caught the old man's hand and knelt by his chair, laughing and crying at once. "I knew--oh, I knew!" she cried, and hid her face in the coverlet. "It is what I have prayed for," he said, after a moment, in a shaking voice. "I said I hoped I would never see his face again, but I was bitter then. He was my only son, after all, and he is your husband. I have thought it all over lying here." Jessica lifted her eyes, shining with a great thankfulness. During these last few days the impulse to tell all that she had concealed had been almost irresistible; now the barrier had fallen. The secret she had repressed so long came forth in a rush of sentences that left him mute and amazed. "I should have told you before," she ended, "but I didn't know--I wasn't sure--" She broke down for very joy. He looked at her with eyes unnaturally bright. "Tell me everything, Jessica!" he said. "Everything from the beginning!" She drew the shade wider before the open window, where he could look down across the two miles of darkening foliage to the far huddle of the town--a group of toy houses now hazily indistinct--and, seated beside him, his hand in hers, poured out the whole. She had never framed it into words; she had pondered each incident severally, apart, as it were, from its context. Now, with the loss of memory and the pitiful struggle of recollection as a background, the narrative painted itself in vivid colors to whose pathos and meaning her every instinct was alive. Her first view of Hugh, the street fight and the revelation of the violin--the part she and Prendergast had taken--the rescue of the child--the leaving of the draft in the cabin, and the strange sleep-walking that had so nearly found a dubious ending--she told all. She did not realize that she was revealing the depths of her own heart without reserve. If she omitted to tell of his evil reputation and the neighborhood's hatred, who could blame? She was a woman, and she loved them both. Dusk came before the moving recital was finished. The rose of sunset grew over the trellised west, faded, and the gloom deepened to darkness, pricked by stars. The old man from the first had scarcely spoken. When she ended she could hardly see his face, and waited anxiously to hear what he might say. Presently he broke the silence.