d.

Robbie did not know when the coach might leave Kendal for Lancaster;
Sim was several hours in front of them, and therefore he took a hasty
leave. The old woman, who lived a solitary life in the cottage, looked
after the young man with eyes which seemed to say that, in spite of
the instinct which prompted her to confide in Robbie, she half
regretted what she had done.

CHAPTER XXX. A RACE AGAINST LIFE.

No sooner had Ralph discovered that the straggler from the North who
lay insensible in the yard of the inn at Kendal was Simeon Stagg than
he pushed through the crowd, and lifting the thin and wasted figure in
his arms, ordered a servant to show him to a room within.

There in a little while sensibility returned to Sim, who was suffering
from nothing more serious than exhaustion and the excitement by which
it had been in part occasioned.

When in the first moment of consciousness he opened his eyes and met
the eyes of Ralph, who was bending above him, he exhibited no sign of
surprise. With a gesture indicative of irritation he brushed his long
and bony hand over his face, as though trying to shut out a vision
that had more than once before haunted and tormented him. But when he
realized the reality of the presence of the man whom he had followed
over many weary miles, whose face had followed him in his
dreams,--when it was borne in upon his scattered sense that Ralph Ray
was actually here at his side, holding his hand and speaking to him in
the deep tones which he knew so well,--then the poor worn wayfarer
could no longer control the emotion that surged upwards from his
heart.

It was a wild, disjointed, inconsequential tale which Sim thereupon
told, which he had come all this way to tell, and which now revealed
its full import to the eager listener in spite of the narrator's
eagerness rather than by means of it. Amid spasms of feeling, however,
the story came at length to an end; and gathering up the threads of it
for himself, and arranging them in what seemed to him their natural
sequence, Ralph understood all that it was essential to understand of
his own position and the peril of those who were dear to him. That he
was to be outlawed, and that his estate was to be confiscated; that
his mother, who still lived, was, with his brother and Rotha, to be
turned into the road,--this injustice was only too imminent.

"In a fortnight--was it so?" he asked. "In a fortnight they were to be
back? A fortnight