After that an unknown room; strange, but kindly faces bending over a bed on which I lay, my own voice repeating always, 'Hildred—Cuthbert—little Jock, good-bye,' until my brain seemed to turn round with the weary words.
The thread of memory breaks there.
I find myself again, crossing a moor on an autumn evening. The heather is in bloom still, and looks purple-red in the low rays of the sun. The wide heath, rising and falling like the waves of the sea, stretches on to join the sky. Poised high aloft, on quivering wings, a sky-lark sings its cloud-song. And far away, backed by the golden sunset, there rises the spire of a little church, with a village clustering round it. I am bound there. There is a pack on my shoulders, for I am a pedlar, and am beginning to get the name you have all called me by for so many years. I am Wandering Willie. In those days I had little heart to care what I became. My life seemed to be over. I little thought how long it would yet last.
But it has not been a sad one, though its story, such as it is, ended on the day when I looked my last on the mist-covered towers of Wyncliffe.
The sharp edge of sorrow wears down with time. Peace, the evergreen, grows where joy once blossomed. The road-side flowers bloom fresh and fair, though the garden has been left behind. I would not have things otherwise than as they are. I would not have my youth back, though all I once longed for so passionately were granted with it.
Youth can rarely say I am content, as I can. Young limbs must breast the mountain side, and I have gained the top.
Hildred and Cuthbert lived long and happily. It was some years before I let Cuthbert know where I was. Then immediately he came to me. After that we saw each other every now and then; and though meeting seldom, we were yet friends and brothers, as we had always been. There never was another secret between us. Hildred long before had told her husband all the story of his four years of absence.
But I never went back to Wyncliffe until I was an old man.
It was after an illness that I had, during which my thoughts turned constantly to Hildred. A longing for her presence, that had been stilled for many years, woke up once more and drew me towards her.
When next Cuthbert came to see me I went back with him to Wyncliffe. As in a dream, nay rather, as one returning from the dead, I saw again the once familiar places—the grey church, the lime-trees, the village-green, where they were playing cricket just as they used in my day. No one knew the old man. All the faces that I met were strange to me; some only bore a dim ghostly likeness to people I had known.