"It seems to me," said Emilia, "that you are scarcely awake yet to your—your situation."
She was trying to recover her superiority, which Hetty had shaken by guessing her secret.
"Oh, yes I am," Hetty answered. "But my time may be short for talking: so I use what ways I can to make my sisters listen. Hark!"
"He is coming!" Nancy announced, running towards them from the gate. Honest love shone in her eyes. "He is coming—and there is someone with him!"
"Who?" asked Emilia. Hetty's eyes put the same question, far more eagerly. She rose up: her face was white.
"I don't know. He—they—are half a mile away. Yet I seem to know the figure. It is odd now—"
Hetty put out a hand and leaned it against the wood-stack to steady herself. The sharpened end of a stake pierced her palm, but she did not feel it.
"Is it—is it—" Her lips worked and formed the words, inaudibly.
"Run and look again," commanded Emilia.
But Hetty turned and walked swiftly away. Could it be he? No—and yet why not? Until this moment she had not known how much she built upon that chance. She loved him still: at the bottom of her heart most tenderly. She had reproached herself, saying that her desire for him had nothing to do with love—was no genuine impulse to forgive, but a selfish cowardly longing to be saved, as only he could save her. She was wrong. She desired to be saved: but she desired far more wildly that he should play the man, justify her love and earn forgiveness. She had—and was, alas! to prove it—an almost infinite capacity to forgive. She, Hetty, of the reckless wit and tongue—she would meet him humbly—as one whose sin had been as deep as his . . .