"Oh, my dear, my dear, how shall we comfort you!" cried poor Cathy, kneeling down beside her, and trying not to burst into tears.
"We must leave that to time and Garth, and only be as good to her as we can," returned her sister gently, and then she took the tired face between her hands and kissed it tenderly and laid it on her breast.
But it was not in human nature to resist all the sweet, wholesome sympathy that surrounded her; and Queenie was young and beloved, besides loving with all her heart. As the days and weeks passed away courage and strength returned to her. It was not that Emmie was forgotten,—deep in her inmost soul lay the image of that dearly-loved sister,—but that her glorious young vitality asserted itself.
"How can I remain so dreadfully unhappy when I have you?" she would whisper to Garth when they paced up and down their favorite plane-tree walk in the sunset; and indeed any girl might have been proud of such a lover.
They had no reserves, these two. Queenie would tell him all her innocent thoughts—how lonely she had felt when she had seen him and Dora together, and how she had watched, night after night, for the red flicker of his cigar as he walked underneath the plane-trees; and Garth listened to her, and though he said very little in reply Queenie was perfectly content.
For day by day the sweet conviction came to her that she was growing deeper into her lover's heart, that the sympathy between them was ever greater; their delight in each other's presence was quiet but intense; speech seemed unnecessary to them, they understood each other without a word.
When two months had passed, and Queenie announced her intention of going to Carlisle and taking up her abode for the present with Caleb Runciman, he let her go almost without a word, though the sunshine seemed to die out of the old house with her presence; and when Langley would have remonstrated he silenced her at once.
"She thinks it will be best, and perhaps she is right. Of course we shall have a dull winter, but it will be worse for her, shut up with that old man; but in the spring she has promised things shall be as I wish." And a flush crossed Garth's handsome face as he spoke, for the thought of bringing home his wife was very sweet and sacred to the young man.
So Queenie spent the long winter months in the narrow little house in the High Street, with only Caleb and Molly. But it was not such a dull life after all. Friends came over from Hepshaw to see her—Faith Stewart, and Miss Cosie, and now and then Langley and Cathy, and every week brought Garth. Queenie and he would take long walks together. How she loved to show him her old haunts—Granite-Lodge, and the Close, and her favorite nook in the Cathedral! Now and then they would walk over to the castle where poor Mary Queen of Scots had been incarcerated, and gaze up at the little window out of which Fergus Vich Ian Vohr used to look. The sentries would look after them as they strolled across the place—the tall, good-looking fellow, with the slight girl wrapped in furs beside him.
"What a color you have, my Queen! and how bright your eyes are!" he would say, for, half in jest and half in loving reality, he often called her "my Queen," and she would look up and smile, well pleased that she had found favor in his eyes.