"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.

Then they talked together long and earnestly, these three, under the
shadow of the terrible mystery that hung above them all, of life and
death. Ralph spoke as one overawed by a sense of fatality. The world
and its v