He went on, holding out an arm, as though by the gesture swearing to his own transgression:  “I counted myself a good man, and I’ll not say now but I did more for”—­some name died upon his lips—­“than one man in a hundred would have done; but in my folly I angered her, and when I’d have given my life ten times over—­”

This, then, was the sorrow that dogged his life.  Trenholme knew, without more ado, that Bates loved the lost girl, that it was her loss that outweighed all other misfortune.  He felt a great compassion:  he said impatiently: 

“There’s no use trying to interfere between brothers.  You can’t see the thing as I see it.  Let’s leave it.”

“Ay, leave it,” cried the other, voice and limb shaking, “and life is short, and the time to die is every time, and if some accident is to sweep us away to-night, who’s to tell him that your death, and your soul too, isn’t on his head?”

“Bother my soul!” said Alec; and yet there was a certain courtesy expressed in the gentler tone in which he spoke, and what he thought was, “How much he must have loved her!”

When the fog had vanished, leaving daylight absolute, this scene of the morning seemed like a dream, and in the evening, as much from curiosity to see if he could revive its essence again as from a friendly desire to relieve the overcharged heart of his comrade, he said: 

“Tell me about her, Bates.  What was she like?”

Bates responded to the question like a man whose heart is beating against the walls of his silence as a bird beats upon its cage.  He spoke a few words, hardly noticing that he was telling his memories; then the mask of his self-bound habit was resumed; then again the dignity of his sorrow found some expression; and still again he would retire into dumbness, setting the questioner aside slightingly; and when he had forgotten that he had drawn back within himself some further revealing would come from him.  It was little that he said in all, but language that has been fused in the furnace of so strong a sorrow and silence has little of the dross of common speech—­the unmeaning, misleading, unnecessary elements:  his veritable memory and thought and feeling were painted by his meagre tale.

Was that tale true?  John Bates would have thought it a great sin to deceive himself or another, and yet, such was the power of his love, blown to white heat by the breath of regret and purified, that when he spoke of the incidents of Sissy’s childhood, of the cleverness she displayed when he taught her, of her growth until the day in which he had offended her by speaking of marriage, when he told of her tears, and prayers, and anger, and of his own despotism, the picture of it all that arose in Trenholme’s imagination was exceedingly different from what would have been there had he seen the reality.  He would not have liked Cameron’s daughter had he seen her, but, seeing her through the medium of a heart that loved her, all the reverence that is due to womanly sweetness stirred in him.  Cupid may be blind, but to the eyes of chastened love is given the vision of God.