eu'?"

"God or Fate--who knows"

CHAPTER XLIV. "WHO WAS KATHLEEN?"

The painful incidents of the morning weighed heavily upon Rosalie, and
she was glad when Madame Dugal came to talk with her father, who was
ailing and irritable, and when Mrs. Flynn drove her away with a kiss on
either cheek, saying: "Don't come back, darlin', till there's roses in
both cheeks, for y'r eyes are 'atin' up yer face!"

She had seen Charley take the path to Vadrome Mountain, and to the
Rest of the Flax-beaters she betook herself, in the blind hope that,
returning, he might pass that way. Under the influence of the fresh
air and the quiet of the woods her spirits rose, her pulse beat faster,
though a sense of foreboding and sorrow hovered round her. The two-miles
walk to her beloved retreat seemed a matter of minutes only, so busy
were her thoughts.

Her mind was one luxurious confusion, through which travelled a ghostly
little sprite, who kept tumbling her thoughts about, sneering, smirking,
whispering--"You dare not go to confession--dare not go to confession.
You will never be the same again--never feel the same again--never think
the same again; your dreams are done! You can only love. And what will
this love do for you? What do you expect to happen--you dare not go to
confession!"

Her reply had been the one iteration: "I love him--I love him--I love
him. We shall be together all our lives, till we are old and grey. I
shall watch him at his work, and listen to his voice. I shall read with
him and walk with him, and I shall grow to think like him a little--in
everything except religion. In everything except that. One day he will
come to think like me--to believe in God."

In the dreamy happiness of these thoughts the colour came to her cheeks,
the roses of light gathered in her eyes. In her tremulous ardour she
scarcely realised how time passed, and her reverie deepened as the
afternoon shadows grew and the sun made to its covert behind the hills.
She was roused by a man's voice singing, just under the bluff where she
sat. To her this voice represented the battle-call, the home-call, the
life call of the universe. The song it sang was known to her. It was as
old as Rizzio. It had come from old France with Mary, had been merged
into English words and English music, and had voyaged to New France.
There it had been sung by lovers in fair vales, on wide rivers, and in
deep forests:

"What is not mine I may not hold,