'You will do for her,' said Wrayworth. 'Thank you. I have no friends to send her to. I meant to have made her very happy.'
'She shall be; I swear it!' Ralph answered fervently, thankful for this charge, which might in some degree help him to pay that debt of gratitude, and forgetful that he had no control of fate, that the promise he gave of happiness was a fearfully presumptuous one. But he made it willingly, gladly, solemnly, before God; and as far as lay in his power it should sacredly be kept; any sacrifice he would make for this child.
His friend's eyes rested on him searchingly for a moment. 'I trust you,' he said—'I trust you.'
The hours passed on, the blazing sun arose, and Ralph went out into the burning glare with bent head and staggering footsteps, while words he had heard long since seemed floating round him in letters of fire: 'Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friend.'—'Is there none greater?' he thought. 'Is there nothing I can do to repay—nothing?'
CHAPTER I.—ASKED.
The years were well on in their teens since that melancholy scene was enacted in the Indian tent—since Wrayworth consigned his only child to the guardianship of the friend whose life, at the expense of his own, he had saved on the battle-field. A carriage rolled along the snowy high-road through the cold clear air; the short winter's day was drawing to its close, and up in the darkening sky the stars were beginning to shine upon the world's most joyful season, upon Christmas eve. The world's most joyful season? We call it so, this festival, more than eighteen hundred years old; but does the world think it so?—the world, with its thousand cares and crosses, its deep and hidden sorrows, its partings and its tears? Of those amongst the myriads who keep the Yule-tide feast, how many hold it with a chastened joy! For on that day most of all our thoughts go back to other years, to other faces, to other lips that have wished us 'a merry Christmas;' to other hands, which have clasped ours so loyally, to those who have loved us so long ago!
But Major Loraine had no sad memories connected with the season as he drove up to the old house, from which duty had so frequently called him, and which he had not seen for five years. In the wide, dark, panelled hall his step-mother stood waiting to welcome him, as gladly as though he had been her own son. He was only a boy when she first came there, when the pink was fresh on her cheek and the gold bright in her hair; they had been drawn to each other then; and through the long years of her widowhood his loving care had helped to lighten her load of sorrow; so it was not wonderful that for months past she had been eagerly looking forward to his return.
The greetings over, they sat down side by side, talking, as those talk after long separation, of past, present, and future; of their acquaintances married, dead, or far away; of things on the estate, prosperous or failures; of the ball to be given next month, of the one they were going to, to-night; of how much Emma was improved since she 'came out,' how Katharine was considered one of the handsomest girls in the place, and how she might marry Sir Michael Leyland with thirty thousand a year if she liked.
'But why ever doesn't she like?' asked the Major, astonished at this new phase in the character of his worldly-minded sister.
'That is just what troubles me,' answered Mrs Loraine. 'They are all at the church now, helping to decorate. Louise wanted to stay at home to welcome you, but I sent them all off, so as to have you to myself for an hour. You will see a great alteration in Louise, Ralph.'