“If you want to know the reason,” whispered her brother,—“I am a deserter. Hush! No noise! or you will be the death of me, as Adam was near being this morning.”
“Won’t you sit down?” said Effie,—as she might have spoken to an intruder from Bedlam.
“Effie, you always used to say what you felt, and all that you felt. Are you changed too? Come; tell me what you are thinking.”
“I think I am in a dream, and do not know whether you be Cuddie, or a fancy of my own. O, Cuddie, I have always loved you next to Walter, and looked upon you as the pride and hope of the family; and as often as I have started from sleep, these four years past, it has been with dreaming over again your being taken at dead of night, and especially your slipping down the cable. The worst moments I have had from the time you rowed away from this ferry, that bright evening, are those between sleeping and waking, when I saw you cold and altered before me, and I could not by any means make you smile. I never,—no I never believed this last would come true. And now,—and now,” she uttered between her sobs, “you know what I am thinking about.”
Cuddie cast himself on the ground, laid his head on her knee, as he had done in many a childish trouble, weeping so that he could not for long be persuaded to look up.
“You are not altogether altered, I see,” said Effie, striving to speak cheerfully. “You are not come back the round-faced, weather-brown seaman I always fancied you would be, but instead, far too much as if you had been famished. Yet your heart is the same.”
“No, no.”
“O, yes. But you have known want lately, and you are discouraged. I much fear you have known want.”
“’Tis not that which has bowed my spirit. Effie, I am altogether heart-broken.”
“Do not dare to say that. We must bear whatever Providence——”