How hollow the laugh sounded on his own ears! It was not what his father would have called heartsome. What was this sadness that was stealing over him and stiffening every sense? Had he yet realized it in all its fulness? Ralph shook himself and struck his hand on his breast, as though driving out the cold. He could not drive out the foreboding that had taken a seat there since Sim looked last in his eyes and cried, “Let me go.”
Laddie frisked about them, and barked back at the echo of his own voice, that resounded through the clear air from the hollow places in the hills. They had not far to go now. The light of the kitchen window at Shoulthwaite would be seen from the turn of the road. Only through yonder belt of trees that overhung the “lonnin,” and they would be in the court of Angus Ray's homestead.
“Ralph,” said Rotha—she had walked in silence for some little time—“all the sorrow of my life seems gone. You have driven it all away.” Her tremulous voice belied the light laugh that followed.
He looked down at her tear-dimmed eyes. Was her great sorrow indeed gone? Had he driven it away from her? If so, was it not all, and more, being gathered up into his own heart instead? Was it not so?
“You have borne it bravely, Rotha—very bravely,” he answered. “Do you think, now, that I could have borne it as you have done?”
There was a tremor in his tone and a tenderness of expression in his face that Rotha had never before seen there.
“Bear it as I have done?” she repeated. “There is nothing you could not bear.” And her radiant face was lit up in that white moonlight with a perfect sunshine of beauty.
“I don't know, Rotha, my girl,” he answered falteringly; “I don't know—yet.” The last words were spoken with his head dropped on to his breast.
Rotha stepped in front of him, and, putting her hand on his shoulder, stopped him and looked searchingly in his face.
“What is this sadness, Ralph? Is there something you have not told me—something behind, which, when it comes, will take the joy out of this glad news you give me?”