Ewen did not meet her eyes. But he shook his head. “Alison and I——” he began, but never finished. How put into words what Alison was to him? Moreover, that which was keeping him back did stand between him and her—at least in his own soul. “Some day, perhaps, I will tell you, Aunt Marget,” he said quietly. “But I’d be glad if you would not discuss my departure just now.—You have dropped your knitting.”
He picked it up for her, and Margaret Cameron stood quite still, looking up uneasily at the height of him, at his brow all wrinkled with some pain of whose nature she was quite ignorant, at the sudden lines round his young mouth. She ended her survey with a sigh.
“And to think that—since we cannot get a letter to her—the lassie may be breaking her heart over there, believing that you are dead!”
Ewen took a step away, with a movement as though to ward off a blow. Then he translated the movement into a design to snuff the candles on the table behind him. After a moment his voice came, unsteady and hurt: “Aunt Margaret, you are very cruel.” And his hand must have been unsteady, too, for he snuffed the flame right out.
“’Tis for your own good,” replied Miss Cameron, winking hard at the engraving of King James the Third as a young man over the mantelshelf in front of her. Ewen relighted from another the candle he had slain, saying nothing, and with the air of one who does not quite know what he is doing. “At least, I’m sure ’tis not for mine,” went on Miss Cameron, and now, little given to tears as she was, she surreptitiously applied a corner of a handkerchief to one eye. “You cannot think that I want you to go away again . . . and leave the house the . . . the mere shell of emptiness it is when you are not here!”
Ewen looked round and saw the scrap of cambric. In an instant, despite the pain it cost him, he had knelt down by her side and was taking her hands into his, and saying how sorry he was to grieve her, and assuring her that there was nothing, nothing whatever wrong between him and Alison.
Yet even then he made no promises about departure.
Nor had he made any a week later, when, one hot afternoon, he lay, reflecting deeply, on the bed in his own room, with his hands behind his head. Although his wounded leg was already much stronger, it rebelled with effect against unremitting use all day, and to Ewen’s intense disgust he found it imperative to spend a portion of the afternoon thus. He regarded this necessity as not only burdensome but disgraceful.
The wind soughed faintly through the pines of the little avenue, and then passed on to ruffle the ivy outside his open window. A little brown, some of them, after their fiery ordeal, the topmost of those tough leaves were still there, and made just the same rustling noise as of old. And there Ewen lay, apparently at peace; back in his own room, among his modest possessions, his life and liberty snatched from the enemy, his home unharmed after all, and over the seas his young wife waiting for him in safety, the call of the sword no longer keeping him back from her, since the sword was shattered.