Under the soothing hand, Randalin’s sobs slowly ceased; when at last she raised her wet eyes there was no longer rebellion in them but only youth’s measureless despair. “Sister, now as always, I want to do what you would have me—but I am so full of grief! Must I go back to Avalcomb and begin all over again? It seems to me that my life stretches before me no more alluringly than yonder dusty road, that runs straight on, on, over vast spaces but always empty.”
The beauty that had been Sister Wynfreda’s hovered now about her mouth as fragrance around a dead rose. Her gaze was on a branch above them where a little brown bird, calling plaintively, was slipping from her nest. Over the wattled edge, two tiny brown heads were peeping like fuzzy beech-nut rinds. “I wonder,” she said, “what those little creatures up there will think when a few months hence the blue sky becomes leaden, such that no one of them ever before recollected it so dark, and the sun that is wont to creep to them through the leaves has gone out like a candle before the winter winds? By reason of their youth, I suppose they will judiciously conclude with themselves that there is never going to be any blue sky again, that their lives will stretch before them in a dark-hued stress of weather, empty of all save leafless trees and frozen fields. My fledgeling, will they not be a little ashamed of their short-sightedness when the spring has brought back the sun?”
The girl’s lips parted before her quickening breath, and the old nun smiled at her tenderly as she moved away with her hands full of the green symbols of healing. “Settle not the whole day of your life at its morning, most dear child, but live it hour by hour,” she said. “If you would be of use now, go gather the flowers for the Holy Table, and when themselves have drawn in holiness from the spot, then shall you bring them to the sick woman over the hill.”
“Yes, Sister,” the girl said submissively. But when she had crossed the daisied grass and opened the wicket gate and came out into the fragrant lane, something seemed to divide her mind with the roses, for though she sent one glance toward the hedge, she sent another to the spot beyond—where the lane gave out upon the great Street to the City—and after she had walked a little way toward the flowers, she turned and walked a long way toward the road, until she had come where her eyes could follow its white track far away over the hills.
“I wonder if I shall ever hunger for heaven as I hunger for the sight of him,” she murmured as she gazed.
But whatever the valleys might hold, the hillsides showed her nothing; sighing, she turned back. “It seems to me,” she said, “that if we could have little tastes of heaven as we went along, then would there still be enough left and the road would seem much shorter.” Sighing, she set to work upon the roses, that had twined themselves in a kindly veil over the bushes.
Standing so, it happened that she did not see the horseman who was just gaining the crest of the nearest hill between her and the City. The wind being from her, she did not even hear the hoof-beats until the horse had turned from the glare of the sun into the shadow of the fern-bordered lane. The first she knew of it, she glanced over her shoulder and saw the red-cloaked figure riding toward her along the grass-grown path.
As naturally as a flower opens its heart at the coming of the sun, she leaned toward him, breathing his name; then in an impulse equally natural, as he leaped from his saddle before her, she drew back and half averted her face, flickering red and white like the blossoms she was clasping to her breast.
He stopped abruptly, a short stretch of grass still between them,—and it soothed her bruised pride a little that there was no longer any confident ease in his manner but only hesitation and uncertainty. His voice was greatly troubled as he spoke: “Never can I forgive myself for having wounded you, sweetheart, yet had I hoped that you might forgive me, because I knew not what I did and because I have suffered so sorely for it.”
“You have suffered,” she repeated with a little accent of bitterness.