"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.

When it appeared that Bates had said all tha