"If she ever consults you, I hope you'll give her some good advice. She wants it bad!"
"I guess I will," said Mr. Purcell, lounging out. "If I don't, you kin."
Rotha wished to escape further remark or enquiry, and went out too. She would divert herself with gathering a great bunch of the fall flowers and dress some dishes. She often refreshed herself and refined the tea-table with a nosegay dressed in the middle of it, especially as it seemed to give not less pleasure to her entertainers than to her. She went now slowly down the gravelled drive, filling her hands as she went with asters, chrysanthemums, late honeysuckles, and bits of green from box and cedar and feathery larches. She went slowly, thinking hard all the way, and feeling very blue indeed. She saw no opening out of her troubles, and she strongly suspected that her aunt meant there should be none. What was to become of her? True, it flashed into her mind, "The Lord is my Shepherd";—but the sheep was taking it into her head to think for herself, and could not see that the path she was following would end in anything but disaster and famishing. If she could but get out of this path——
Ah, silly sheep!
Rotha found herself at the gate leading into the high road; the gate by which she had been admitted so many months ago, and which she had never passed through since. She did not open it now; she stood still, resting one hand on the bars of it and gazing off along the road that led to Tanfield. It was quite empty; there was little passing along that road in the best of times, and very little at this season. It looked hopeless and desolate, the long straight lines of fences, and the gray, empty space between running off into nothing. Anything moving upon it would have been a relief to the eye and the mind; it looked like Rotha's own life at present, unchanging, Monotonous, solitary, barren, endless. Yet very precious flowers had been lately blossoming upon her path, and fragrant plants springing; but this, if she partly knew, at this moment she wholly ignored or forgot. She stood in a dream reverie, looking forward with her bodily eye, but with the eye of her mind back, and far back; to her mother, to her father, to Mr. Digby, and the times at Medwayville when she was a happy child. Nothing regular or consecutive; a maze of dream images in which she lost herself, and under the power of which her tears slowly gathered and began to run down her cheeks. Standing so, looking down the long empty road, and in the very depths of disheartened foreboding and dismay, a step startled her. Nobody was in sight on the road towards Tanfield; it was a quick business step coming in the other direction. Rotha turned her head hurriedly, and then was more in a maze than ever, though of a different kind. Close by the gate somebody was standing. A stranger? And why did he look so little strange? Rotha's eyes grew big unconsciously, while she likewise utterly forgot that they were framed in a setting of wet eyelashes; and then there came flashing changes in her face. I cannot describe how all the lines of it altered; and fire leapt to her eye, not without an alternating shadow however, a sort of shadow of doubt; her lips parted, but she could not bring out a word. The stranger stood still likewise, and looked, and I am not sure but his eyes opened a little; light came into them too, and a smile.
"Have I found you?" he said. "Perhaps you will let me come in."
And while Rotha remained in stupid bewilderment and uncertainty of everything except the identity of the person before her, he laid hold of the latch of the gate and made his own words good; Rotha giving way just enough to allow of it. I think the new-comer was a little uncertain as well; nevertheless he was not the sort of man to shew uncertainty.
"Is this my little Rotha?" he said as he came up to her; and then, taking her hand, he began just where he left off, by stooping and kissing her. That roused Rotha, as much as ever the kiss of the prince in the fairy tale woke the sleeping beauty. The blood flushed all over her face, she pulled her hand away, and flung herself as it were upon the gate again; laying hold of the bars of it and bending down her face upon her arms. What did he do that for? and had he a right? After leaving her unthought of for so many years, was he entitled to speak to her and look at her and—kiss her, just as he could do once when she was a child? Rotha's mind was in terrible tumult, for notwithstanding this protest of reason, or of feeling, that touch of his lips upon her lips had waked up all the old past; it was just like the kiss with which he had bid her good bye three years ago; but whether to forgive him or not, and whether there was anything or not, Rotha did not yet know. Yet the old power of his presence was asserting itself already. All she could do was to keep silent, and the silence was of some little duration; for Mr. Digby, as his old fashion was, waited.
"I see you have not forgotten me," he said at length. "Or—should I say—"
"I thought you had forgotten me, Mr. Southwode," said Rotha. She said it with some dignity, removing her arms from the gate and standing before him. Yet she could not raise her eyes to him. Her manner was entirely unexceptionable and graceful.