“This is no time for idle vanities,” he said; “it’s no time to indulge unreal modesties; and you have none of either if it were.  God has laid His hand on us all, Rotha; yes, and our hearts are open without disguise before Him—­and before each other, too, I think.”

“Yes,” said Rotha.  She scarcely knew what to say, or whither Ralph’s words tended.  She only knew that he was speaking as she had never heard him speak before.  “Yes, Ralph,” she repeated.

“Perhaps, as I say, it’s harder for me to ask than for you to answer, Rotha,” he continued, and the strong man looked into the girl’s eyes with a world of tenderness.  “Do you think you have any feeling for Willy—­that is, more than the common?  I saw how you sat together as I came in to you.  I’ve marked you before, when he has been by.  I’ve marked him, too.  You’ve been strength and solace to him in this trouble.  Do you think if he loved you, Rotha—­do you think, then, you could love him?  Wait,” he added, as she raised her eyes, and with parted lips seemed prepared to speak.  “It is not for him I ask.  God knows it is as much for you as for him, and perhaps—­perhaps, I say, most of all—­for myself.”

With a frank voice and face, with luminous eyes in which there was neither fear nor shame, Rotha answered,—­

“Yes, I could love him; I think I do so now.”

She spoke to Ralph as she might have spoken to a father whom she reverenced, and from whom no secret of her soul should be hid.  He heard her in silence.  Not until now, not until he had heard her last word, had he realized what it would cost him to hear it.  The agony of a lifetime seemed crushed into that short moment.  But he had made it for himself, and now at length it was over.  To yield her up—­perhaps it was a link in the chain of retribution.  To say nothing of his own love—­perhaps it would be accepted as a dumb atonement.  To see her win the love and be won by the love of his brother—­perhaps it would soften his exile with thoughts of recompense for a wrong that it had been his fate to do to her and hers, though she knew it not.  There was something like the white heat of subdued passion in his voice when he spoke again.

“He does love you, Rotha,” he said quietly, “and he will ask you to be his wife.  But he cannot do so yet, and, meantime, while my mother lives—­while I am gone—­God knows where—­while I am away from the old home—­I ask you now once more to stay.”

The great clock in the corner ticked out loud in the silence of the next minute; only that and the slow breathing of the dog sleeping on the hearth fell on the ear.

“Yes, I will stay,” said the girl; and while she spoke Willy Ray walked into the kitchen.