"And I should never have said it, but I have a confidence in you beyond my faith in any other mortal. I wanted you to know it, and keep it hidden in your heart, though we part forever."
"For my life I can't see why."
"It will be bitter, but that knowledge will help us to live through it."
"Oh, we will live through it—like the survivors live through death. The sun shines on graves all over the world, but the mourners go about the streets."
She burst into sobbing again, holding up her handkerchief to her eyes. Suddenly she lifted her head.
"They are coming—they are coming! Do I look as if I had been crying? Oh, I don't want them to know—it's like a sacrilege for them to know! There! there is a man coming along that path. What is that in his hand? Let us ride forward and stop him, as if we had been questioning him."
She drew the white gauze veil over her tearful eyes, and her cheeks all pallid from weeping, and together they rode forward to hail the mountaineer who had stopped stock still on beholding them. And from the long reaches of the road, like the footsteps of approaching doom, they heard the iterative tramp of hoofbeats, every moment growing louder.
CHAPTER XVIII
As the distanced equestrian party came within view of the two in advance they perceived that Lloyd was riding forward toward a young mountaineer who stood at gaze in the path which intersected the somewhat more definitely marked main road. They could hear Lloyd's cheery, vibrant voice as he called out to him:
"Where does this road lead?"