In the fulness of her joy Rotha had not marked the tone in which Ralph spoke when 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.”

Laddie frisked about them, and barked back at the echo of his own voice, that resounded through the clear air from the hollow places in the hills.  They had not far to go now.  The light of the kitchen window at Shoulthwaite would be seen from the turn of the road.  Only through yonder belt of trees that overhung the “lonnin,” and they would be in the court of Angus Ray’s homestead.