Five Mile Beach weekly journal., 1909-03-19

The figure in the chair looked up as
the door opened. "HughT' he cried
and half lifted himself from his seat.
Then he settled back, and the sunken,
lndomitable eyes fastened themselves
IN his sons face.
Hugh was melodramatic-cheaply so.
He saw the girl start at the name, saw
her hands catch at the kimono to draw
Its folds over the bare white throat,
saw the rich color that flooded her
brow. He saw himself suddenly the
moving hero of the stagery. the
t~ractive force of the situation. Real
tears came to his eyes; tears of insin-
cere feeling, due partly to the cheap
whisky he had drunk that day. whose
outward consequences he had so dras-
tically banished, and partly to sheer
nervous excitation.
"Fatherr' he said, and came and
caught the gaunt hand that shook
against the chair.
Then the deeps of the old mans
heart were suddenly broken up. my
sont" he cried and threw his arms
about him. "Hugh, my boy, my boyl"
Jessica waited to zeal no more.
Thrilling with gladness and flushing
with the sudden recollection of her
bare throat and feet, she slipped away
to her room to creep into bed and lie
wide eyed and thinking.
What did he look like? OF his face
she had never seen even a counterfeit
presentment. Through what adven-
lures had he passed? Now that he had
come home, forgiving and forgiven,
would he stay? He had been in his
room when she entered it with the
roses-must have guessed, If he had
not already known, that she was blind.
Would he guess that she had cared for
that room, had placed fresh flowers
there often and often?
Since she had come to the house in
the aspens Jessica had found the
imagined figure Of Hugh a dominant
presence In q horizon lightened with
a throng of new impressions. The
direful catastrophe of her blindness
1t had been the sudden result of an
accident-had fallen like a thunderbolt
upon a nature elastic and joyous. 1t
had brought her face to face with q
revelation of mental agony, made her
feel herself the hapless martyr of
that curt thing called chance. She had
always lived largely in books and
pictures, and her world was still full
of ideals and Of brave adventures.
Gratitude had made her love the mo.
rose old invalid with his grabbed tenn
pers, and the wandering son, choosing
for pride's sake q resourceless battle
with the world-the very mystery of
his whereabouts-had taken strong
hold of her Imagination. OF the quar-
rel which had preceded Hugh's depar-
ture she had made her own version.
That he should have come back on this
very night, when the disinheritance
she had dreaded had been SO nearly
consummated, seemed now to have an
especial and an appealing significance.
Presently she rose, slipped on the
red kimono, and, taking a key from
the pocket of her gown, stole from the
room. She assembled q stairway and
unlocked the door of a wide, bare at
tic where the moonlight poured
through a skylight in the roof upon an
unfinished statue. In this statue she
had begun to fashion, In the imagined
figure of Hugh, her conception of the
prodigal son-not the battered and
husk filed wayfarer of the parable,
but a figure of character and pathos,
erring through youthful pride and
spirit. The unfinished clay no eyes
had seen, for those walls bounded her
especial domain.
When Hugh went sh~amefacedly up
the stair from the library the artificial
glow that had tingled to his finger tips
had faded. The poise of mind, the
gertrude of all the faculties of eye
and hand that his icy bath had given
him. were yielding The penalties he
had dislodged were returning re-en-
forced. He was rapidly becoming
drunk.
He CROPPED his way to his room, turn
ed out the light, threw himself fully
dressed upon the bed and slept the
deep sleep of deferred intoxication.