en he gave her in a word all the new life that bounded in her
veins. But that tone was one of sadness, and that word had seemed to
drain away from veins of his some of the glad life that now pulsated
in hers. Was it nothing that the outcast among men whom he alone, save
this brave girl, had championed, had convinced him of his innocence?
Nothing that the light of a glad morning had broken on the long night
of the blithe creature by his side, and brightened her young life with
the promise of a happier future?

"Look, Ralph, look at the withered sedge, all frost-covered!" said
Rotha in her happiness, tripping up to his side, with a sprig newly
plucked in her hand. Ralph answered her absently, and she rattled on
to herself, "Rotha shall keep you, beautiful sedge! How you glisten in
the moonlight!" Then the girl broke out with a snatch of an old Border
ballad,--

Dacre's gane to the war, Willy,
Dacre's gane to the war;
Dacre's lord has crossed the ford,
And left us for the war.

"Poor father," she said more soberly, "poor father; but he'll come
back home now--come back to our _own_ home again"; and then,
unconscious of the burden of her song, she sang,--

Naworth's halls are dead, Willy,
Naworth's halls are dead;
One lonely foot sounds on the keep,
And that's the warder's tread.

The moon shone clearly; the tempest had lulled, and the silvery voice
of the girl was all that could be heard above the distant rumble of
the ghylls and the beat of Ralph's heavy footsteps. In a moment Rotha
seemed to become conscious that her companion was sad as well as
silent. How had this escaped her so long? she thought.

"But you don't seem quite so glad, Ralph," she said in an altered
tone, half of inquiry, half of gentle reproach, as of one who felt
that her joy would have been the more if another had shared it.

"Don't I? Ah, but I _am_ glad--that is, I'm glad your father won't
need old Mattha's bull-grips," he said, with an attempt to laugh at
his own pleasantry.

How hollow the laugh sounded on his own ears! It was not what his
father would have called heartsome. What was this sadness that was
stealing over him and stiffening every sense? Had he yet realized it
in all its fulness? Ralph shook himself and struck his hand on his
breast, as though driving out the cold. He could not drive out the
foreboding that had taken a seat there since Sim looked last in his
eyes and cried, "Let me go