Again she laughed out, as she seemed so suddenly to have learned to do. "And I would have stayed away and let you starve to death? You must open your mouth, David, and not try to talk now."
"Ah, no, that's enough. We've a thousand things to say and plans to make. You eat while I talk. When I am up, we must find some one to stay with your mother. She should not be left alone." Cassandra paled a little. He was watching her face. "You will be staying up here with me, you know, all the time."
"Yes—I know." Her throat seemed to tighten, and she looked off toward the hills, as her way was.
"Don't you like the thought of staying up here with me? Make your confession, dearest one." He drew her down to look in his eyes. "It's done. We are man and wife."
Her eyes swam with tears, but her lips smiled. "I do. I do want to bide with you. All the way before me now looks like a long path of light—like what I have dreamed sometimes when the moon shines long down the mists at night. Only one place—I can't quite see—is it shadow or not. Perhaps it's only the thought of mother down there alone."
She spoke dreamily and with the same look of seeing things beyond, except that now she fixed her eyes, not on the mountain top, but on his own.
"Is it in my eyes you see the long path of light? Are we together in it? I see you always with the light about you. I saw you so first in your own home before the blazing fire—such a hearth fire as I had never seen before. You have appeared to me in my dreams with light about you ever since, and in my visions when I have been riding over these hills alone. What are you seeing now?"
"You, as you helped me that first time, there in the snow. You looked so ill, but your way was strong, and I thought—all at once, in a flash—like it came from—"
"Go on."
"Like it came from my father: 'One will come for you.'" She hid her face in his bosom, and her words came smothered and brokenly, "All the ride home I put them away, but they would come back, his words: 'On the mountain top, one will come for you'; but we were in such trouble—I thought it was just the thought of my father. It's always strongest when trouble comes, like he would comfort me."