Then she dropped her face again, and was still as the dead she embraced; but as she spoke of her son's bravery, those scant, hot tears that agony forces on old age came to her eyes and burned there.
CHAPTER LXXIV.
COMING HOME.
UNCLE, I have brought you a daughter."
Sir Noel looked up from the volume he was reading, and saw Lady Rose standing before him, flushed, agitated, but with a glow of exaltation in her eyes that he had never seen there before. With one arm she encircled the waist of Walton's bride, the other hand she extended in the grace of unconscious pleading; for the young creature she more than half supported was trembling like a leaf. Touched with exquisite pity, Sir Noel arose, drew Ruth gently toward him, and kissed her on the forehead.
"We shall have Walton better now," he said, leading her to a seat. "With two such nurses he can have no excuse for keeping ill."
"Is he so ill?" questioned Ruth, blushing crimson at the sound of her own voice. "I thought, I hoped—"
"We all hoped that the short journey up from 'Norston's Rest' would do him good rather than harm; but he has been more than usually restless," said Sir Noel. "If Lady Rose will excuse me, I will have the pleasure of taking you to his room myself."
Ruth stood up, blushing because of her own eager wishes; ready to cry because of the quiet gentleness with which her intrusion into that family had been received. Never, in all her short life, had she so keenly felt the great social barriers that she had overleaped. If reproaches and coldness had met her on the threshold of that house, she could have borne them better than the kindness with which Lady Rose had introduced her, and the gracious reception awarded her by Sir Noel; for she could not help feeling how much had been suppressed and forgiven by that proud man, before he could thus offer to present her with his own hand to his son.