She took my hand, and for a moment softly stroked it, looking away. “You’re much changed, dear,” she said, “since our mother died.”
“Oh, Bessie!”
“Ay,” she sighed.
I hung my head. ’Twas a familiar bitterness. I was, indeed, not the same as I had been. And it seems to me, now—even at this distant day—that this great loss works sad changes in us every one. Whether we be child or man, we are none of us the same, afterwards.
“Davy,” my sister pleaded, “were your poor sister now t’ ask you t’ say no word——”
“I would not say one word!” I broke in. “Oh, I would not!”
That was the end of it.
Next day the doctor bade me walk with him on the Watchman, so that, as he said, he might without interruption speak a word with me: which I was loath to do; for he had pulled a long face of late, and had sighed and stared more than was good for our spirits, nor smiled at all, save in a way of the wryest, and was now so grave—nay, sunk deep in blear-eyed melancholy—that ’twas plain no happiness lay in prospect. ’Twas sad weather, too—cold fog in the air, the light drear, the land all wet and black, the sea swishing petulantly in the mist. I had no mind to climb the Watchman, but did, cheerily as I could, because he wished it, as was my habit.
When we got to Beacon Rock, there was no flush of red in the doctor’s cheeks, as ever there had been, no life in his voice, which not long since had been buoyant; and his hand, while for a moment it rested affectionately on my shoulder, shook in a way that frightened me.