“No, Tom,” said she, answering his look, “I’m just thinking about—up there! and all we can be to each other and the rest of the world.”
“My darling! I wish I were a good man, I wish I were stronger! If it were not for you!”—
He checked himself, and she could feel the brace of his muscles under the coatsleeve where her hand rested, as if he were even then fighting with some invisible foe. A light cloud came over the moon’s face, and the road and fields, covered with new-fallen snow, looked colder than before. She shivered, and drew more closely to his side. He was quick to read her thoughts, this big, clumsy fellow, and he spoke instantly.
“I know, Rita,” he said, softly, stroking her hand and using the pet name that he had made for her when they were children; “I know you’ll stand by me through everything. And, whatever evil things I have in me, with you at my side, I’ll try to put down. Heaven help me!”
He took off his cap, and Charity thought she never saw him look so noble and humble and manly as he did then. The moon, too, was out again, and its light rested like a benediction on his broad forehead, whose veins stood out strangely to-night.
A moment later and he was gone. Charity watched him striding away across the field until he was out of sight. As she turned to her own home she noticed his tracks and the dark blotches they made on the pure, white surface of the snow before her door. Somehow they troubled her, and, without thinking, she made a little futile brush at the nearest footprint with the corner of her shawl, thus only enlarging and making it more unsightly than before. Then, with a nervous laugh at her own foolish fancies, she entered the house.
II
The next morning, long before the rest of the family were astir, Charity was sitting at her window, hooded and wrapped for the long ride. How she had looked forward to this day! With refreshing sleep and the sweet hopefulness of morning, all her doubts of the preceding night had flapped away like bats into the darkness where they belonged; and she was as fair and rosy and bright-eyed as the dawn itself when she appeared at the door a few minutes later, in answer to a merry jingle of sleighbells. Tom’s mood was as happy as her own, and the sturdy little horse jogged along only too fast over the icy road when they had turned his head toward the city.