"Have you no idea what was in the letter?"
"No."
"It was to ask you a question, which I had determined not to ask just then, but I changed my mind. The answer, I told you, I should wait for in Edinburgh seven days; after that, I should conclude you meant No, and sail. No answer came, and I sailed."
He was silent. So was she. A sense of cruel fatality came over her. Alas! those lost years, that might have been such happy years! At length she said, faintly, "Forget it. It was not your fault."
"It was my fault. If not mine, you were still yourself—I ought never to have let you go. I ought to have asked again; to have sought through the whole world till I found you again. And now that I have found you—"
"Hush! The girls are here."
They came along laughing, that merry group—with whom life was at its spring—who had lost nothing, knew not what it was to lose!
"Good-night," said Mr. Roy, hastily. "But—to-morrow morning?"
"Yes."
"There never is night to which comes no morn," says the proverb. Which is not always true, at least as to this world; but it is true sometimes.