"Are you not glad, mother mine?" he asked gently.
"Oh yes, my son--glad and proud of the honour done you, of the appreciation shown of your worth and service. But how will you be able to undergo all that fatigue, and the perils and sufferings of another voyage? That is what goes to my heart. You are so little fit for it all!"
"I have found that a man can always be fit for his duty," said Wolfe gravely. "Is not that so, Kate?"
"With you it is," she answered, with another of her wonderful glances; and the mother, watching the faces of the pair, rose from her seat and crept from the room. Her heart was at once glad and sorrowful, proud and heavy; she felt that she must ease it with a little weeping before she could talk of this great thing with the spirit her son would look to find in her.
Wolfe and Kate were left alone together. He got possession of her other hand. She was standing before him still, a beautiful bloom upon her face, her eyes shining like stars.
"You are pleased with all this, my Kate?" he asked; and he let the last words escape him unconsciously.
"Pleased that your country should do you this great honour? Of course I am pleased. You have deserved it at her hands; yet men do not always get their deserts in this world."
"No; and you must not think that there are not hundreds of better and braver men than myself in our army, or that I am a very wonderful person. I have got the wish of my heart--it has been granted to me more fully than I ever looked to see it; but how often do we see in the hour of triumph that there is something bitter in the cup, something we had not looked to find there. Three months ago I was burning to sail for Quebec, and now--"
He paused for a moment, and she looked full at him.
"Surely you have not changed. You want to go; your heart is set upon it!"