“Oh, don’t talk to me!” he cried passionately. “The world has all gone wrong with me, and I am a cursed and bitter man. God knows that I am, or I could not speak as I do. They’ll find out some day that I am not a murderer and a thief.—I’m losing time, for the fish are rising fast.”
She stood looking after him wistfully as he strode along by the river side, and then walked away with the old dull, agonised look coming back into her face.
“Poor boy!” she said softly. “Poor boy!”
“Coming back on Friday—coming back on Friday!”
Sarah Woodham’s words kept repeating themselves in Chris Lisle’s ears as he walked on up the glen, waving his fishing-rod so that the line hissed and whistled through the air, and at every repetition of the words his heart bounded, and the young blood ran dancing through his veins.
“Coming back on Friday!”
It was as if new life were rushing through him; his step grew more elastic, his eyes brightened, and he leaped from rock to rock, where the brown water came flashing and foaming down.
“Coming back,” he muttered; “coming back.”
The past was going to be dead; the clouds were about to rise from about him, and there was once more going to be something worth living for.
“Bah!” he ejaculated, “I’ve been a morose, bitter, disappointed fool, too ready to give up; but that’s all past now. She is coming back, and all this time of misery and despair is at an end.”