The room had undergone a wonderful change since it had first been Lily’s bower. It had changed much while she was there alone, but the change was much greater within the last week than all that had happened before. It had become a home: there were two chairs by the fire, there was an indefinable consciousness in every thing of two minds, two people, the union and conjunction which make society. It was all warm, social, breathing of life, no suggestion in it of loneliness or longing, or unsatisfied thought, or the solitude which breathes a chill through every comfort. Lily, sitting alone, had been, it was very clear, left but for a moment. This sentiment cannot, indeed, expand stone walls, yet the once dull and chilly drawing-room, with its deep small windows, seemed to possess a widened circle, a fuller atmosphere. Into this already had there pushed a care or two, the reflection of the diversities of two minds as well as their union? If so, it only helped to widen the sphere still further, to make it more representative of the world. Lily looked up from the book she had taken up in her husband’s absence with a change of countenance and sudden exclamation.
“You are going to-morrow? Not we?” she cried.
“My bonnie Lily, you were always reasonable—how could it be we? I’m thankful, though, that you meant it to be we, for it was not a happy thought that my own lassie, my wife of a week old, was pushing me away, back with the first loosening of the frosts, into the world.”
“You never thought that, you never could have thought that!” cried Lily, divided between indignation and a tumult of new feeling that rose in her. And then she covered her face with her hands. “Are you going to leave me here, Ronald, my lane, my lane?” she cried, with a tone of anguish in her voice.
He was behind her, drawing her head upon his shoulder, soothing her in every way he knew. “Oh, Lily, my darling, don’t say I have beguiled you! What could it be else, what could it be? I might have held out by myself and kept away. I might have sworn I would never go near you, for your sweet sake. Would you rather I had done that, Lily? Is it not better to belong to each other, my darling, at any cost, so as to be ready in a moment to take advantage of a bright day when it comes?”
“Of a bright day when it comes?” she said, suddenly taking her hands from her face. A chill as if of the ice outside came upon Lily. She was as white as the snow, and cold, and trembled. “Is that all—is that all that is between you and me, Ronald?” she cried.
“Now, Lily, my dearest, how can you ask such a question? Is that all? Nothing is all! There are no bounds to what is between you and me; but because we have to be parted for a time that was not a reason for always keeping apart, was it, Lily? I thought, my darling, you agreed with me there. We have had a happy honeymoon as ever any pair had, happier, I think, than ever any blessed man but me. And now I must go out to the bleak world to work for my bonnie wife. Oh, it will be a bleak world no longer; it will all be bright with the thought that it is for my bonnie Lily. And you will just wait and keep your heart in a kist of gold, and lock it with a silver key.”
“Ah, that was what she says she should have done before——” cried Lily with a sharp ring of pain in her voice. Then she subdued herself and looked up into his face. “I am ready to share whatever you have, Ronald. I want no luxuries, no grand house. I want no time to get ready. I’ll be up before you to-morrow and my little things in a bundle and ready to follow you, if it was in a baggage-wagon or at the plough’s tail!”
“I almost wish it was that,” he said, eager for any diversion. “If I had been a ploughman lad, coming over the hills to Nannie O; with a little cot to take her to as soon as she could be my own!” These were echoes of the songs Lily had sung to him, and he to her, in their hermitage when shut in by the snow.
“But just up under the roof in a high house in the old town, or one of the new ones out to the west of Princes Street—that new row, with a nice clean stair and a door to it to shut it in: to me that would be as good as any little cot upon the ploughed fields.” Lily spoke eagerly, turning round to him with hands involuntarily clasped.