“Oh, this cannot be our burden!” Jonathan cried, with all the rapture still warm in his heart.
“If it is, it will be light, or heavy, or none at all, as we shall bear it,” David answered, with a smile of infinite tenderness.
For several days he allowed Jonathan to visit the Bradley farm alone, saying that it must be so on Ruth's account. Her love, he declared, must give her the fine instinct which only their mother had ever possessed, and he must allow it time to be confirmed. Jonathan, however, insisted that Ruth already possessed it; that she was beginning to wonder at his absence, and to fear that she would not be entirely welcome to the home which must always be equally his.
David yielded at once.
“You must go alone,” said Jonathan, “to satisfy yourself that she knows us at last.”
Ruth came forth from the house as he drew near. Her face beamed; she laid her hands upon his shoulders and kissed him. “Now you cannot doubt me, Ruth!” he said, gently.
“Doubt you, Jonathan!” she exclaimed with a fond reproach in her eyes. “But you look troubled; is any thing the matter?”
“I was thinking of my brother,” said David, in a low tone.
“Tell me what it is,” she said, drawing him into the little arbor of woodbine near the gate. They took seats side by side on the rustic bench. “He thinks I may come between you: is it not that?” she asked. Only one thing was clear to David's mind—that she would surely speak more frankly and freely of him to the supposed Jonathan than to his real self. This once he would permit the illusion.
“Not more than must be,” he answered. “He knew all from the very beginning. But we have been like one person in two bodies, and any change seems to divide us.”