The governess gave a great sigh. "Thank God!" she said. "There was no time to think. It was all on the spur of the moment. But I knew that you were there, that you'd see. And you saw all that; it was all there for you to see!" She closed her eyes, and her lips moved in further thanksgiving.
"Dear, I saw—his soul," said Milly timidly; "it is not dead. I saw more—I saw his love!"
The fair head shook.
"No; that must be dead."
"Then why should it move him so? Why should he mind? What could the song be to him, if you were nothing? Dear, you are everything—still!"
The fair head shook again, and more decidedly.
"It's impossible. But I may do something. I have brought him to this, and I'll bring him back from it, with God's help!"
And as she stood up suddenly, to her last inch, Milicent again beheld the white, keen face touched for an instant with all the radiant exaltation of the Angelic Hosts.
"I might have known it," continued Miss Winfrey, in a calmer, more contemplative tone. "I knew him; I might have guessed the rest. Such troubles come and go with the ordinary young man, but Wilfrid was never that. His name is Wilfrid Ferrers, Milly—your Cattle-station Bill! As I have told you, his father was a country clergyman; and clergymen's sons are always the worst. Willie had been rather wild before I knew him; he used to tell me all about it, for he was the most open-hearted boy in all the world, and could keep nothing to himself. If he could, he wouldn't; for sail under his true colours he must, he used to say, even if they were the black flag. But they weren't. His wildness was one-half high spirits, and the other half good-nature. But it showed the man. He had once—I almost smile when I remember how he was once before the magistrates for some reckless boyish folly at the hospital! He would stick at nothing; but he used to say that I could do what I liked with him, make what I would of him. And what have I made?" cried the unhappy girl, in a relapse as sudden as her resolve. "A broken heart—a broken life!" She sank down at one of the desks, threw her arms upon the slope, and wept passionately. And yet again she was up, rapping the desk with her knuckles as she would in school, and staring masterfully at Millicent, out of her streaming eyes.