“No, Rotha, it was not.”

“Not father?” cried the girl; “you know it was not?”

“I know it was not.”

The voice again was not the voice of one who brings glad tidings, but the words were themselves full of gladness for the ear on which they fell, and Rotha seemed almost overcome by her joy.  She clutched Ralph’s arm with both hands.

“Heaven be praised!” she said; “now I can brave anything—­poor, poor father!”

After this the girl almost leapt over the frozen road in the ecstasy of her new-found delight.  The weight of weary months of gathering suspense seemed in one moment to have fallen from her forever.  Half laughing, half weeping, she bounded along, the dog sporting beside her.  Her quick words rippled on the frosty air.  Occasionally she encountered a flood that swept across the way from the hills above to the lake beneath, but her light foot tripped over it before a hand could be offered her.  Their path lay along the pack-horse road by the side of the mere, and time after time she would scud down to the water’s edge to pluck the bracken that grew there, or to test the thin ice with her foot.  She would laugh and then be silent, and then break out into laughter again.  She would prattle to herself unconsciously and then laugh once more.  All the world seemed made anew to this happy girl to-night.

True enough, nature meant her for a heartsome lass.  Her hair was dark, and had a tangled look, as though lately caught in brambles or still thick with burrs.  Her dark eyebrows and long lashes shaded the darkest of black-brown eyes.  Her mouth was alive with sensibility.  Every shade of feeling could play upon her face.  Her dress was loose, and somewhat negligently worn; one never felt its presence or knew whether it were poor or fine.  Her voice, though soft, was generally high-pitched, not like the whirl of wind through the trees, but like its sigh through the long grass, and came, perhaps, to the mountain girl from the effort to converse above the sound of these natural voices.  There was a tremor in her voice sometimes, and, when she was taken unawares, a sidelong look in her eyes.  There was something about her in these serious moods that laid hold of the imagination.  She had surely a well of strength which had been given for her own support and the solace of others at some future moment, only too terrible.  But not to-night, as she tripped along under the moonlight, did the consciousness of that moment overshadow her.

And what of Ralph, who strode solemnly by her side?  A change had come over him of late.  He spoke little, and never at all of the scenes he had witnessed in his long campaign—­never of his own share in them.  He had become at once an active and a brooding man.  The shadow of a supernatural presence seemed to hang over everything.  Tonight that shadow was blacker than before.