"The words hold wonderful comfort. The triumphant sense of a sure and certain hope, always seems to me to be the keynote of the whole."
"Those were the words that stayed in my mind, penetrating through everything else," she said softly, "and though—John had gone away into what seemed unbreakable silence, I knew—that—he had not really gone. I had the sure and certain hope—oh! and more than hope—that he was—very safe, and very near me all the time."
The naïve expression, the simplicity of the words, spoken from the depths of a simple and sincere heart, flooded Fergusson's heart again with a sense of reverent love, that almost amounted to adoration; but no opportunity to answer her was given him, for Sir Arthur turned back to join Cicely, and a few minutes' further walk brought them to the inn at Graystone, where they were to lunch, before their drive to the railway station. Rupert parted from the rest at the door of the inn. Perhaps Christina was the only member of the party, who realised that he had come to the end of his tether, that an imperative necessity for solitude was upon him, that his power of endurance was nearly at an end. She was standing behind Sir Arthur, when Rupert bade them all good-bye; it was with her that he shook hands last of all, and as she looked up into his face, her eyes held some strange comfort for him. He did not put it into words; he could not have explained even to himself, had he tried to do so, why it was that the glance of those sweet eyes sent a little restful feeling into his troubled heart; but as he went away, some of the tension of misery seemed to relax, the numbness of his pain grew less; in some dim way his hurt had been salved.
"Your cousin seems to have been a most devoted friend to my poor sister," Sir Arthur said, after lunch, when he and the two ladies and Fergusson were seated in the small sitting-room of the inn awaiting their carriage. "I cannot conceive why, in the world she could not have married a man like that, instead of the poor miserable fellow who made her life and his own, a burden to them both."
"She loved her husband very much," Christina put in gently.
"Oh! she loved him—she loved him far too much," Sir Arthur answered testily. "I cannot understand, I never shall be able to understand, how a woman can throw away all her heart and life, on a man who is totally unworthy of her."
Back into Christina's mind flashed the remembrance of words Margaret had spoken long before: "You don't know what it is to care so much for a man, that no matter what he is or does, he is your world, your whole world," but it was Cicely, not she who answered sagely—
"I don't believe a man can ever really understand the way a woman loves. A woman's love is made up of so many ingredients, she herself can hardly analyse it, and no man could ever begin to get near its true analysis."
Sir Arthur looked at her with the kindly smile of one who listens to the prattling of a child, then resumed his own train of thought and words, as if she had not spoken at all.
"My brother-in-law was a perpetual source of anxiety to me," he said; "not that I knew him. I only saw him once, and I was not favourably impressed on that occasion; but I can honestly say that until I heard he was in his grave, I had no really quiet moments."