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Updated: June 19, 2025
It was long though he had no concealments from her before he told Jean of this interview. And then he did not tell the woman's name, nor did she care to know. Time passes, even with an impatient lover, and so there came an end at last to Grant Harlson's season of probation. There was nothing dramatic about the wedding.
It seemed to me that the hard lines in Grant Harlson's face became, week by week and month by month, less harshly and clearly defined, while upon the face of his wife grew that new look of a content and ownership which marks the woman who sleeps in some man's arms, the one who owns her the same look which Grant, with his broader experience and keener insight, used to recognize when he puzzled me so in telling whimsically, in the street cars, who were wedded, without looking at their rings.
He found, maybe, distraction, too, in chatting with slim Jenny Bierce, who was a very little girl when he was in the country school, but who had grown into almost a woman, and who was a trifle more refined, perhaps, than most of her associates. She had a sweetheart, a stalwart young farmer named Harrison Woodell, one of the schoolmates of Harlson's early youth, but she liked to talk with Harlson.
She knew that I had done it for the best, but if there were really any hope for this wicked man, if he had really decided upon a new life, we ought to encourage him. Did I think him in earnest? I told her that it hurt me to say it, but that I had no great confidence in Mr. Harlson's protestations. He was of the earth, earthy.
The room was thronged, and there was a roar of cheers. The issue was decided beyond all question. The newspaper offices were flashing out the fact from illuminated windows. There were shouting crowds upon the streets. Hosts of people were grasping Harlson's hand. He had little to say save to thank them in a perfunctory manner. He was in a hurry to get home.
I was interested in watching Harlson's face. He was a trifle pale, despite his usual self-control, and was noting the figures carefully. Added precincts repeated the same story. Harlson would take up a return, glance at it, compare it with another, and then examine a dozen of them together, for once in his life he was taken unawares, and was at sea.
And, one evening, there was a man in deep trouble, and in the morning he sat beside a bed in which was his small wife and beside her a tiny red thing, "rather underdone," he said, in the buoyant reaction which came upon him, for that was Harlson's way when he had emerged from trouble; and the small red thing was the son of the two of them. And who can tell what the man said to the woman.
His style of tissue was not fixed in northern bay and fjord and English and Norman forests, and his ancestors transmitted to him a self-denying stomach. He can live in the city upon thirty-five cents a day, and clasp his hands across his abdomen and say, with the thankful, "I have dined." Not so the man of Harlson's type, and of his size.
We'll eat a good dinner and smoke, and good digestion will wait on appetite, and we'll plan and say we'll do better next time." So we left the hurly-burly and took the train, and were at Harlson's home a little before the dinner hour. Grant tried his latch-key, but it would not serve. He rang the bell, but there came no answer.
A pebble at the rivulet's head will turn the tiny current either way, and so change the course of eventual creek and river. The pebble fell near the source in Grant Harlson's case, for never before in his life had he studied much the moral problem.
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