hip, but till then
I need a little solitude to mend broken threads."

There was the true gentleman for you, and I sorrowed that I should ever
have misjudged him. He shook my hand in all brotherliness, and went
down the glen with Bertrand, who longed to see his children again.

Elspeth remained, and concerning her I fell into my old doubting mood.
The return of my strength had revived in me the passion which had dwelt
somewhere in my soul from, the hour she first sang to me in the rain.
She had greeted me as girl greets her lover, but was that any more than
the revulsion from fear and the pity of a tender heart? Doubts
oppressed me, the more as she seemed constrained and uneasy, her eyes
falling when she met mine, and her voice full no longer of its frank
comradeship.

One afternoon we went to a place in the hills where the vale of the
Shenandoah could be seen. The rain had gone, and had left behind it a
taste of autumn. The hill berries were ripening, and a touch of flame
had fallen on the thickets.

Soon the great valley lay below us, running out in a golden haze to the
far blue mountains.

"Ah!" she sighed, like one who comes from a winter night into a firelit
room. She was silent, while her eyes drank in its spacious comfort.

"That is your heritage, Elspeth. That is the birthday gift to which old
Studd's powder-flask is the key."

"Nay, yours," she said, "for you won it."

The words died on her lips, for her eyes were abstracted. My legs were
still feeble, and I had leaned a little on her strong young arm as we
came up the hill, but now she left me and climbed on a rock, where she
sat like a pixie. The hardships of the past had thinned her face and
deepened her eyes, but her grace was the more manifest. Fresh and dewy
as morning, yet with a soul of steel and fire--surely no lovelier
nymph ever graced a woodland. I felt how rough and common was my own
clay in contrast with her bright spirit.

"Elspeth," I said hoarsely, "once I told you what was in my heart."

Her face grew grave. "And have you not seen what is in mine?" she
asked.

"I have seen and rejoiced, and yet I doubt."

"But why?" she asked again. "My life is yours, for you have preserved
it. I would be graceless indeed if I did not give my best to you who
have given all for me."

"It is not gratitude I want. If you are only grateful, put me out of
your thoughts, and I will go away and strive to forget you. There were
twenty in the Tidewater