Ermine smiled and shook her head.
“Well, then, you’ll have Agnes.”
“I shall have trouble—that’s what I shall have: it’s the only thing sure in this world: and it’s that loving it sticks to you all the tighter if you’ve got nothing else. There’s nought else does in this world—without it’s dogs.”
“‘There’s a Friend that sticketh closer than a brother,’” quoted Gerhardt softly.
“There’s precious few of them,” returned Isel, who naturally did not understand the allusion. “You’ll not find one of that sort more than once in a— Mercy on us! here’s a soldier walking straight in!—whatever does the man want?”
Gerhardt’s quick eyes had caught the foreign texture of the soldier’s mantle—the bronzed face with its likeness to Derette—the white cross of the English Crusader.
“He wants his wife and children, I should think,” he answered calmly; and at the same moment the soldier said—
“Isel! Wife! Dost thou not know me?”
Nobody in the room could have given a clear and connected account of what happened after that. Isel cried and laughed by turns, the majority all talked at once, and little Rudolph, divided between fear and admiration, clung to his mother, and cast furtive glances at the new-comer. Manning was naturally astonished to see how his family had grown, and much had to be explained to him—the presence of the Germans, the approaching marriage of Flemild, the past marriage of Romund, and the profession of Derette. The first and third he accepted with bluff good-humour. As to the second, he said he would have a talk with Raven Soclin—very likely he was all right now, though he remembered him a troublesome lad. But Derette’s fate did not appear quite to please him. She had been his pet, and he had pictured her future differently and more according to his own notion of happiness.
“Well, she seems to like it best herself,” said Isel, “and I don’t see but you have to leave folks to be happy their own way, though the way some folks choose is mighty queer. Father Dolfin says we must always give God the best, and if we grudge it to Him, it wipes out the merit of the sacrifice.”