I thought it all over as I went slowly homewards, with a dull quietness that it was very strange to feel. I remembered him as a boy, and could recall his great love to me, without more than a numb heartache, and a feeling of wonder that I was not more unhappy.
I thought of a future in which I should be always lonely, and Hildred for ever broken-hearted, with a sort of pity for us both, as if I were but a looker-on at our lives.
And yet I envied Hildred; for when I went late at night to ask after her, they told me that she had sobbed herself to sleep. For the moment she had escaped from trouble, and her stormy sorrow all left behind, she had gone away into the land of dreams, where tears are not.
For me there were neither dreams nor sleep. All night I sat in my father's elbow-chair beside the fire, not caring to go to bed. At first the flames kept me company as they rose and fell and flickered, lighting the room fitfully. The stars shone in, glittering through the window. Then the fire died down to a dull glow. It grew black, with only a red spark here and there. It went quite out, and the room grew very cold. The night waned. A mist rose up and covered the stars. It became darker and darker. Then I suppose I fell asleep, for when I looked again, the grey chill of a winter's dawn was in the room. It was no longer to-day, but yesterday, that we heard of Cuthbert's death.
I dreaded seeing Hildred in her sorrow. It made me feel strange to her, as if I should not know how to greet her, and that instead of her familiar self, she would be to me as a mourner upon whom a great grief had newly fallen! Poor little Hildred. The strangeness all went away, and was forgotten directly we met, and she ran to me and held my hands, crying, 'Oh Willie, I wanted you. He belonged to you and me.'
'But I can't feel as if it could be true,' she said presently. 'I keep thinking all the time—of course it's foolish—that perhaps old Esther Reynolds made a mistake after all, and that David Moore meant some one else. Eh, Willie?'
I shook my head. 'But I can go to see him, and ask him about it,' I said, after thinking a little.
'Oh, will you? And ask him to tell us,'—her voice failed, and she shuddered,—'ask him whether it was great pain, and if it was soon over. I cannot bear to think he suffered long.'
Ah, Hildred! so you too had thought of those dreary questions that had been haunting me all night.
'I will go to-day,' I said. And that evening I was at the Ferry House.