"There is nothing in the world to forgive! I think we have been a little absurd!"
It was his turn to feel how words could lash.
"I am glad you see it so," he said, and wondered, during the rest of their drive, filled as it was with the commonplace of small talk, how he could have forgotten her likeness to the vapid, futile, fashionable women at the Summit; while she, hurt and bewildered, was wondering what he had meant, whether he had known her all along for the person she was, Colonel Randall's daughter and only heir, and in the stupidity of a countryman had failed in the observance due to her position.
When White Rosy stopped at the little red gate, willingly, as always, the two children were there to welcome them. Ogilvie, in spite of Timmy's beseeching arms, would not stay to supper, as he often did.
Tim sat down on the brick path and lifted his voice in a wail. "Oh, ev'rybody's gonin' away!" he cried; and his anguish increased by his own words, he further declared, "Ev'rybody has went away!"
Rosamund picked up the boy, but he wriggled down from her arms. In spite of her care for him, and the good-fellowship there was between her and both the children, who were ordinarily devoted enough, nothing of the maternal had as yet been aroused in her; and in the moments when he needs the only comfort that satisfies childhood, a child knows instinctively whether there is aught of the mother in the arms that hold him.
But Rosamund was in need of love to-day. "Why, Timmy," she cried, still holding him to her, "I am here! I have not gone away!"
"I don't want my White Lady to go away! I want my White Lady!" was Timmy's cry. "Ev'rybody's gonin' away!"
Now Yetta became voluble in explanation of his cry. "She is going away! She came over while you were gone, 'cause she said maybe she won't be able to come to-morrow. She says she's got to pack, 'cause the old one's going back to town. Lots o' people have gone already, it's so cold; and the old one thinks it's going to set in to rain, so she's going home, an' Mis' Reeves has got to go with her."
"My White Lady's gonin' away!" Tim wailed again, with a concentration of thought that might have been admirable under other circumstances. "Ev'rybody's gonin' away!"