“Graeme, you are not afraid for Harry now? I mean not more afraid?”
Graeme started. Her thoughts were painful, as her face showed; but they were not of Harry.
“I don’t know, love. I hope not. I pray God, no harm may come to Harry. Oh! Rosie, Rosie, we have been all wrong this long, long time. We have been dreaming, I think. We must waken up, and begin again.”
Chapter Twenty Four.
Graeme’s first judgment of Allan Ruthven, had been, “how these ten years have changed him;” but she quite forgot the first judgment when she came to see him more, and meeting his kind eyes and listening to his kind voice, in the days that followed she said to herself, “he is the same, the very same.”
But her first judgment was the true one. He was changed. It would have been strange if the wear and tear of commercial life for ten years had not changed him, and that not for the better.
In the renewal of intercourse with his old friends, and in the new acquaintance he made with his brother Charlie, he came to know himself that he had changed greatly. He remembered sadly enough, the aspirations that had died out of his heart since his youth, the temptations that he had struggled against always, but which, alas! he had not always withstood. He knew now that his faith had grown weak, that thoughts of the unseen and heavenly had been put far-away from him.
Yes; he was greatly changed since the night he had stood with the rest an the deck of the “Steadfast,” watching the gleaming lights of a strange city. Standing now face to face with the awakened remembrance of his own ideal, he knew that he had fallen far short of its attainment; and reading in Graeme’s truthful eye “the same, the very same,” his own often fell with a sense of shame as though he were deceiving her.