“I never got any letter.  I never had one word from you after the Sunday you bade me good-by, promising to write.”

“And I did write,” cried he, passionately.  “I posted it with my own hands.  You should have got it on the Tuesday morning.”

She leaned against the laurel bush, that fatal laurel bush, and in a few breathless words told him what David had said about the hidden letter.

“It must have been my letter.  Why did you not tell me this before?”

“How could I?  I never knew you had written.  You never said a word.  In all these years you have never said a single word.”

Bitterly, bitterly he turned away.  The groan that escaped him—­a man’s groan over his lost life—­lost, not wholly through fate alone—­was such as she, the woman whose portion had been sorrow, passive sorrow only, never forgot in all her days.

“Don’t mind it,” she whispered—­“don’t mind it.  It is so long past now.”

He made no immediate answer, then said,

“Have you no idea what was in the letter?”

“No.”

“It was to ask you a question, which I had determined not to ask just then, but I changed my mind.  The answer, I told you, I should wait for in Edinburgh seven days; after that, I should conclude you meant No, and sail.  No answer came, and I sailed.”

He was silent.  So was she.  A sense of cruel fatality came over her.  Alas! those lost years, that might have been such happy years!  At length she said, faintly, “Forget it.  It was not your fault.”

“It was my fault.  If not mine, you were still yourself—­I ought never to have let you go.  I ought to have asked again; to have sought through the whole world till I found you again.  And now that I have found you—­”

“Hush!  The girls are here.”

They came along laughing, that merry group—­with whom life was at its spring—­who had lost nothing, knew not what it was to lose!

“Good-night,” said Mr. Roy, hastily.  “But—­to-morrow morning?”

“Yes.”

“There never is night to which comes no morn,” says the proverb.  Which is not always true, at least as to this world; but it is true sometimes.

That April morning Fortune Williams rose with a sense of strange solemnity—­neither sorrow nor joy.  Both had gone by; but they had left behind them a deep peace.

After her young people had walked themselves off, which they did immediately after breakfast, she attended to all her household duties, neither few nor small, and then sat down with her needle-work beside the open window.  It was a lovely day; the birds were singing, the leaves budding, a few early flowers making all the air to smell like spring.  And she—­with her it was autumn now.  She knew it, but still she did not grieve.

Presently, walking down the garden walk, almost with the same firm step of years ago—­how well she remembered it!—­Robert Roy came; but it was still a few minutes before she could go into the little parlor to meet him.  At last she did, entering softly, her hand extended as usual.  He took it, also as usual, and then looked down into her face, as he had done that Sunday.  “Do you remember this?  I have kept it for seventeen years.”