“My child,” he said, very gravely and gently, “we have both done wrong, and must forgive each other; but my sin is the heavier. I was older and I knew the world, and I ought to have remembered that my child-wife did not know it too. If you had not been so young you would never have left me, but now my Wee Wifie will never desert me again.”
“No, never. Oh,” pressing nearer to him with a shudder, “to think how you have suffered. I could not have borne it if I had known.”
“Yes,” he said, lightly, for her great, beautiful eyes were wide with trouble at the recollection, and he wanted to see her smile, “it has changed me into a middle-aged man. Look how my hair has worn off my forehead, and there are actually gray hairs in my beard. People will say we look like father and daughter when they see us together.”
“Oh,” she returned, shyly, for it was not quite easy to look at him—Hugh was so different somehow—“I shall not mind what people say. Now I have my own husband back, it will not matter a bit to me how gray and old you are.” Then, as Hugh laughed and kissed her, she said in a very low voice, “Do you really mean that you can be content with me, Hugh; that I shall not disappoint you any more?”
“Content,” he answered, fondly, “that is a poor word. Have I ever really deserved you, sweetheart; but I mean to make up for that. You are very generous, Fay; you do not speak of Margaret—ah, I thought so,” as her head drooped against his shoulder—“she is in your mind, but you will not venture to speak of her.”
“I am so afraid you must regret her, Hugh.”
And Hugh, with a shade of sadness on his fine face, answered, slowly:
“If I regret her, it is as I regret my lost youth. She belongs to my old life; now I only reverence and cherish her memory. Darling, we must understand each other very clearly on this point, for all our unhappiness springs from that. We must have no secrets, no reservations in our future life; you must never fear to speak to me of Margaret. She was very dear to me once, and in some sense she is dear to me still, but not now, thank God, so precious in my eyes as the wife He has given me.” Then, as she put her arms round his neck and thanked him with innocent, wifely kisses, he suddenly pressed her to him passionately, and asked her to forgive him, for he could never forgive himself.
Then, as the evening shadows crept into the green nest, Fay proposed timidly that they should go back to the Manse, for she wanted to show Hugh their boy; and Hugh consented at once. And hand in hand they went through the tangled underwood and past the shimmering falls; and as Hugh looked down on his little wife and saw the new sweet womanliness that had grown on her with her motherhood, and the meek purity of her fair young face, he felt a proud happiness thrilling within him, and knew that it was God-given, and that its blessing would last him throughout his whole life.