So she put the subject from her as something quite past and done with. And there was something else quite past and done with.
“I am afraid I have been very foolish and wrong,” she said, letting her thoughts go farther back into the day. She said it over and over again, and it was true. She had been foolish, and perhaps a little wrong. Never once, since that miserable night, now more than two years ago, when he had brought Harry home, had Graeme touched the hand or met the eye of Allan Ruthven. She had frequently seen Lilias, and she had not consciously avoided him, but it had so happened that they had never met. In those old times she had come to the knowledge that, unasked, she had given him more than friendship, and she had shrunk, with such pain and shame, from the thought that she might still do so, that she had grown morbid over the fear. To-day she had seen him. She had clasped his hand, and met his look, and listened to his friendly words, and she knew it was well with her. They were friends whom time, and absence, and perhaps suffering, had tried, and they would be friends always.
She did not acknowledge, in words, either her fear or her relief; but she was glad with a sense of the old pleasure in the friendship of Allan and Lilias; and she was saying to herself that she had been foolish and wrong to let it slip out of her life so utterly as she had done. She told herself that true friendship, like theirs, was too sweet and rare a blessing to be suffered to die out, and that when they came home again the old glad time would come back.
“I am glad that I have seen them again, very glad. And I am glad in their happiness. I know that I am glad now.”
It was very late, and she was tired after the long day, but she lingered still, thinking of many things, and of all that the past had brought, of all that the future might bring. Her thoughts were hopeful ones, and as she went slowly up the stairs to her room, she was repeating Janet’s words, and making them her own.
“I will take heart and trust. If the work I have here is God-given, He will accept it, and make me content in it, be it great or little, and I will take heart and trust.”
Chapter Thirty Seven.
If, on the night of the day when Janet went away, Graeme could have had a glimpse of her outward life for the next two years, she might have shrunk, dismayed, from the way that lay before her. And yet when two years and more had passed, over the cares, and fears, and disappointments, over the change and separation which the time had brought, she could look with calm content, nay, with grateful gladness. They had not been eventful years—that is, they had been unmarked by any of the especial tokens of change, of which the eye of the world is wont to take note, the sadden and evident coming into their lives of good or evil fortune. But Graeme had only to recall the troubled days that had been before the time when she had sought help and comfort from her old friend, to realise that these years had brought to her, and to some of those she loved, a change real, deep, and blessed, and she daily thanked God, for contentment and a quiet heart.