Durgan felt that day to be a distinctly happy one. A youth makes many pictures of happiness for himself, and he must have but a poor outfit of hope and imagery whose pictures are realized. Yet happiness springs up beside the steps of the older wayfarer, a wild flower that he has not sown or tended. In places where his familiar burden lightens, or when gathering clouds disperse, it pushes up its bright flower-face with a positive beauty and fragrance, something much fairer and better than the mere negation of trouble, yet not so gay as mere imagined joys. Durgan, who had come to this mountain thinking to be alone, and had become so strenuously involved in the fate of his neighbors, to-day not only felt peace in the cessation of fear and gloomy forebodings which had enwrapped them all, but was lifted beyond this to participate in the joy of heavenly deliverance which transfigured Hermione Claxton. He could not think of her to-day without a strange, new, selfless pleasure which he did not analyze; and, added to this, his heart leaped up in gratitude on his own account, for surely now the wife he was bound to honor would be spared the public odium which to her vain nature would be peculiar agony. The fate of a long, living death for the man who had stifled every honorable impulse to avoid the legal punishment of death was robbed of its worst horror, because it gave him immunity from the passion of fear by which he was enslaved, and restored him to the arms of the only human love which could not be quenched by his misconduct and disgrace. Durgan knew enough to suppose that when his wife's first glamor of reverence for Claxton had passed, when, with the help of such a skilful prompter, she had succeeded on the stage of her ambition, his home with her had been no longer even peaceful. The letters 'Dolphus had stolen had convinced Durgan that she was prepared to get rid of her protégé if possible; and when he left her he was practically a homeless fugitive, the whole world his enemy. From such a fate self-destruction, or yielding to the last penalty of the law, were the only ways of escape, had not the angel of mercy intervened. Later in the day Alden came from the room above the carriage house, the room in which Durgan had spent his first two curious nights on Deer Mountain. He only knew of the finding of the fugitive, for, on being assured of this, he had fallen asleep in sheer exhaustion. The rain was shifting for the time, affording intervals of blithe air and mellow sunlight. Alden sat him down upon a settle in the verandah. The trailing vines and the passion-flower were glowing with the life-renewing moisture, but the gorgeous leaves and long tassels of the love-lies-bleeding had fallen, sodden with the rain.