"What is it that men do not understand?" he had asked her in his simple, straight-forward way.
"The blessedness of giving," she had answered him, without guile or hesitation, "the privilege of being able to see and love what is highest and best without hope or thought of return. Some women feel like that."
Good heavens! could she—was it a bare possibility that she could be speaking of herself? and though, a moment after, he repelled this thought with a blush of shame over the vanity of such a supposition, other words conspired to haunt him.
"Those that have sympathy here must have sympathy there," she had gravely assured him, and her earnestness had moved him to excitement. What if this sympathy were between them two; between him, Garth Clayton, and the young creature that he had befriended?
"Dolt, fool, idiot! that's what I've been for my pains," growled Garth between his teeth, as he struck at a young sapling with his stick; "as though one could map and trace out one's feeling and one's life in that way. What is Dora to me after all compared to this girl, this stranger, whom I did not know six months ago; and yet, like a blockhead, I must try to bind myself to her, and call her my Fate." And then he softened and grew pitiful. "Poor Dora! poor dear Dora!" he said, with a kindly memory of his old playmate, and all his anger died out of him.
After all, there was a very true friendship between them none the less that he did not deceive himself, and called it by its right name.
Garth meant to go home straight that night, like the good young man he was; but, somehow, before he was aware he had unlatched the little gate. Perhaps it was the sound of Langley's voice in the porch that determined him. Of course it was the duty of an affectionate brother to escort her home.
But Langley had only left her own warm fireside to visit an ailing child in the village, and was carrying the report to the young school-mistress.
She still wore her Sister-of-mercy's grey cloak, as Cathy called it, which Queenie was half-coaxingly, half-playfully trying to unfasten. She started at Langley's surprised exclamation, and again that paleness was perceptible.
As for Garth, he flushed a little over the girl's evident surprise.