“Oh, Katie, I wish we had you at Norlaw!” cried the lad, with sudden earnestness.
“Yes,” said Katie, simply, “if you had only had a sister, Huntley!—but Mrs. Livingstone does not care for strangers. And mothers are sometimes fondest of their sons—everybody says so; but I know you’re the eldest, and every thing comes on you.”
“Patie is the wisest,” said Huntley, with a momentary smile; “I think he could manage better without me—and, Katie, I’ll have to go away.”
She looked up at him with a question in her eyes. She asked nothing audibly, but merely suspended her work, and turned, with a friendly anxiety, her steady, kind gaze upon Huntley’s face. The young man was not “in love"—he was still too familiar with this sisterly face, and too much occupied with all the sudden troubles in which he had himself been plunged, to think of any such thing; but, unconsciously, Huntley paused before answering—paused to take the peaceful scene, the home apartment, the bright serious eyes into his memory, a picture of strange influence and tenderness never to fade.
“I thought of going to Australia,” he said; “they say a man with a will to work and some knowledge, especially of cattle, is sure to thrive there. It matters but little, I think, Katie, whether I’m a hundred or a thousand miles away, so long as I am away; and I think the best place for me is there.”
“But Australia is many a thousand miles away,” said Katie, “at the other end of the world; and you can not come home to see your friends as you might do from a nearer place. If you go there, Huntley, we’ll never see you again.”
“I’ll go there, that I may come back,” said Huntley, eagerly; then he began to play with the ball of cotton which Katie was mending her children’s stockings with; then he looked round the room wistfully once more. “And when I do come home,” said the lad, “Katie, I wonder, I wonder, what changes I’ll see here?”
“Oh, whisht!” cried Katie, with a little overflow of tears; “papa’s not young, but he’s no’ very old; and if it’s God’s will, we’ll aye be the same.”
“It might be ten—fifteen years,” said Huntley; “and I was not thinking of the minister; I was thinking of—other things.”
Katie did not ask what these other things might be. The color rose in her cheek a little, but not enough to confuse her.