But it did not appear that she heard him. Letting go his hand, she seated herself on the edge of the tombstone, and looked up at him with eyes that, barely touched by the light from the window, seemed to him strangely, almost pitifully childish—eyes of a child that had lost its mother young.
"Her face was not changed, or a very little; far less than I feared. She is beautiful, my own Ruth—beautiful as she is good."
"And happy?" he found himself asking.
"Happy and unhappy. Happy in her good man, in her children?—oh, yes. But unhappy, just now, because they are unhappy and in trouble. There was a gloom upon Eli Tregarthen's face, a look of pain——"
"Of anger, too, and of wonder mixed with it, I daresay. He has been hit by a blow he does not understand."
"But we will help them."
The Commandant stared into the darkness. There was gloom, too, on his face, had there been light enough to reveal it.
"The Lord Proprietor is a very obstinate man."
"Yes, yes; but I mean that we will help them to-night. I cannot bear to think of Ruth carrying her trouble home and lying awake with it."
"Perhaps she will not." The Commandant remembered how he himself had carried a burden to church that morning and left it there.