Gwladys looked up from her knitting as he entered the house with relief, and, rising to meet her husband, placed a trembling hand on his arm.
"Hugh, where have you been? you are so late! I would be frightened, indeed, only I know you have much to do to settle things before you give up."
"Yes, business, merch i; I am not often late for meals—too good an appetite for that, Gwladys; and you cook them too nicely for that! What have you for supper? Something good, I can tell by the smell." And he rattled on to hide the embarrassment which he saw in Gwladys' face.
"Yes, fried herrings and onions; you like them, don't you?" she said, with a wistful anxiety to please, very touching to Hugh in his present mood of self-reproach; "and a white loaf Madlen has made for thee."
"Supper then, and business to the winds!" said Hugh cheerfully. "Come and sit down, merch i, or the board will not be full."
"I went to look for thee," said Gwladys, sitting down opposite him at the small table, "but there was no one in the sail-shed except Ivor Parry."
"Perhaps indeed!" answered Hugh, with simulated indifference; "I suppose he had some last arrangements to make; he is going to-morrow."
"Yes, he told me." And with the relief of having been perfectly open, Gwladys ate her supper, and talked with more ease and cheerfulness than she had shown at first.
Hugh hastened to change the subject, and with tender thoughtfulness took more than his share of the conversation all the evening. If there was one good trait stronger than another in his character, it was justice. Before all things, Hugh Morgan had been a "just" man; and there was growing in his heart, where at first anger and suspicion had held their own, a strong feeling of admiration for these two—his friend and his wife—who had met under his own eyes, where nothing but their honourable natures restrained them, where they thought no eye was upon them to mark a loving look, no ear to hear a tender farewell, no tongue of scandal to blame them, and yet had come forth immaculate, spotless, blameless, from the trial. He doubted whether he himself would have passed scathless through the temptation, and the nobility of his soul responded to the perfect freedom from guile, which he had seen in the interview between Ivor and Gwladys. It was not to be wondered at, therefore, if, in the days following, his voice, his manner, his actions towards his young wife bore the stamp of a more than usually gentle and chivalrous homage. It fell on Gwladys' perturbed spirit like a tonic, bracing her for still more strenuous efforts to keep in the difficult path on which she had entered. And so outward calm and peace brooded over the Mishteer's cottage, for within it were two beings, who, though the glamour and beauty of life were denied them, yet walked courageously on with open brow and steadfast feet, looking neither to the right nor to the left, but simply to the endeavour to do their part nobly in the battle of life.
To Mwntseison also had returned a season of calm. Its inhabitants had latterly been considerably uplifted, not to say inflated, by the evident personal notice accorded to them by Providence! Gwen's bidding, with the unheard-of generosity of the donors, had been like a pleasant fillip to the lethargic tendency of the rural mind, had stimulated and whetted their appetites for more sensations, so that the Mishtress's narrow escape had been received with much appreciation.