A visitor was awaiting Guida and the child: a man who, first knocking
at the door, then looking in and seeing the room empty, save for the dog
lying asleep by the fire, had turned slowly away, and going to the cliff
edge, looked out over the sea. His movements were deliberate, his body
moved slowly; the whole appearance was of great strength and nervous
power. The face was preoccupied, the eyes were watchful, dark,
penetrating. They seemed not only to watch but to weigh, to meditate,
even to listen--as it were, to do the duty of all the senses at once. In
them worked the whole forces of his nature; they were crucibles wherein
every thought and emotion were fused. The jaw was set and strong, yet
it was not hard. The face contradicted itself. While not gloomy it had
lines like scars telling of past wounds. It was not despairing, it
was not morbid, and it was not resentful; it had the look of one both
credulous and indomitable. Belief was stamped upon it; not expectation
or ambition, but faith and fidelity. You would have said he was a man
of one set idea, though the head had a breadth sorting little with
narrowness of purpose. The body was too healthy to belong to a fanatic,
too powerful to be that of a dreamer alone, too firm for other than a
man of action.
Several times he turned to look towards the house and up the pathway
leading from the hillock to the doorway. Though he waited long he did
not seem impatient; patience was part of him, and not the least part.
At last he sat down on a boulder between the house and the shore, and
scarcely moved, as minute after minute passed, and then an hour and
more, and no one came. Presently there was a soft footstep beside him,
and he turned. A dog’s nose thrust itself into his hand.
“Biribi, Biribi!” he said, patting its head with his big hand. “Watching
and waiting, eh, old Biribi?” The dog looked into his eyes as if he
knew what was said, and would speak--or, indeed, was speaking in his
own language. “That’s the way of life, Biribi--watching and waiting, and
watching--always watching.”
Suddenly the dog caught its head away from his hand, gave a short joyful
bark, and ran slowly up the hillock.
“Guida and the child,” the man said aloud, moving towards the
house--“Guida and the child!”
He saw her and the little one before they saw him. Presently the child
said: “See, maman,” and pointed. Guida started. A swift flush passed
over her face, then she smiled and made a step forward to meet her
visitor.
“Maitre Ranulph--Ranulph!” she said, holding out her hand. “It’s a long
time since we met.”
“A year,” he answered simply, “just a year.” He looked down at the
child, then stooped, caught him up in his arms and said: “He’s grown.
Es-tu gentiment?” he added to the child--“es-tu gentiment, m’sieu’?”
The child did not quite understand. “Please?” it said in true Jersey
fashion--at which the mother was troubled.
“O Guilbert, is that what you should say?” she asked. The child looked
up quaintly at her, and with the same whimsical smile which Guida had
given to another so many years ago, he looked at Ranulph and said:
“Pardon, monsieur.”
“Coum est qu’on etes, m’sieu’?” said Ranulph in another patois greeting.
Guida shook her head reprovingly. The child glanced swiftly at his
mother as though asking permission to reply as he wished, then back at
Ranulph, and was about to speak, when Guida said: “I have not taught him
the Jersey patois, Ranulph; only English and French.”
Her eyes met his clearly, meaningly. Her look said to him as plainly as
words, The child’s destiny is not here in Jersey. But as if he knew
that in this she was blinding herself, and that no one can escape the
influences of surroundings, he held the child back from him, and said
with a smile: “Coum est qu’on vos portest?”
Now the child with elfish sense of the situation replied in Jersey
English: “Naicely, thenk you.”
“You see,” said Ranulph to Guida, “there are things in us stronger than
we are. The wind, the sea, and people we live with, they make us sing
their song one way or another. It’s in our bones.”
A look of pain passed over Guida’s face, and she did not reply to his
remark, but turned almost abruptly to the doorway, saying, with just the
slightest hesitation: “You will come in?”
There was no hesitation on his part. “Oui-gia!” he said, and stepped
inside.
She hastily hung up the child’s cap and her own, and as she gathered in
the soft, waving hair, Ranulph noticed how the years had only burnished
it more deeply and strengthened the beauty of the head. She had made the
gesture unconsciously, but catching the look in his eye a sudden thrill
of anxiety ran through her. Recovering herself, however, and with an air
of bright friendliness, she laid a hand upon the great arm-chair, above
which hung the ancient sword of her ancestor, the Comte Guilbert Mauprat
de Chambery, and said: “Sit here, Ranulph.”
Seating himself he gave a heavy sigh--one of those passing breaths of
content which come to the hardest lives now and then: as though the
Spirit of Life itself, in ironical apology for human existence, gives
moments of respite from which hope is born again. Not for over four long
years had Ranulph sat thus quietly in the presence of Guida. At first,
when Maitresse Aimable had told him that Guida was leaving the Place du
Vier Prison to live in this lonely place with her newborn child, he had
gone to entreat her to remain; but Maitresse Aimable had been present
then, and all that he could say--all that he might speak out of his
friendship, out of the old love, now deep pity and sorrow--was of no
avail. It had been borne in upon him then that she was not morbid, but
that her mind had a sane, fixed purpose which she was intent to fulfil.
It was as though she had made some strange covenant with a little
helpless life, with a little face that was all her face; and that
covenant she would keep.
So he had left her, and so to do her service had been granted elsewhere.
The Chevalier, with perfect wisdom and nobility, insisted on being
to Guida what he had always been, accepting what was as though it had
always been, and speaking as naturally of her and the child as though
there had always been a Guida and the child. Thus it was that he counted
himself her protector, though he sat far away in the upper room of
Elie Mattingley’s house in the Rue d’Egypte, thinking his own thoughts,
biding the time when she should come back to the world, and mystery be
over, and happiness come once more; hoping only that he might live to
see it.
Under his directions, Jean Touzel had removed the few things that Guida
took with her to Plemont; and instructed by him, Elie Mattingley sold
her furniture. Thus Guida had settled at Plemont, and there over four
years of her life were passed.
“Your father--how is he?” she asked presently. “Feeble,” replied
Ranulph; “he goes abroad but little now.”
“It was said the Royal Court was to make him a gift, in remembrance
of the Battle of Jersey.” Ranulph turned his head away from her to the
child, and beckoned him over. The child came instantly.
As Ranulph lifted him on his knee he answered Guida: “My father did not
take it.”
“Then they said you were to be constable--the grand monsieur.” She
smiled at him in a friendly way.
“They said wrong,” replied Ranulph.
“Most people would be glad of it,” rejoined Guida. “My mother used to
say you would be Bailly one day.”
“Who knows--perhaps I might have been!”
She looked at him half sadly, half curiously. “You--you haven’t any
ambitions now, Maitre Ranulph?” It suddenly struck her that perhaps she
was responsible for the maiming of this man’s life--for clearly it was
maimed. More than once she had thought of it, but it came home to her
to-day with force. Years ago Ranulph Delagarde had been spoken of as
one who might do great things, even to becoming Bailly. In the eyes of a
Jerseyman to be Bailly was to be great, with jurats sitting in a row
on either side of him and more important than any judge in the Kingdom.
Looking back now Guida realised that Ranulph had never been the same
since that day on the Ecrehos when his father had returned and Philip
had told his wild tale of love.
A great bitterness suddenly welled up in her. Without intention, without
blame, she had brought suffering upon others. The untoward happenings
of her life had killed her grandfather, had bowed and aged the old
Chevalier, had forced her to reject the friendship of Carterette
Mattingley, for the girl’s own sake; had made the heart of one fat old
woman heavy within her; and, it would seem, had taken hope and ambition
from the life of this man before her. Love in itself is but a bitter
pleasure; when it is given to the unworthy it becomes a torture--and so
far as Ranulph and the world knew she was wholly unworthy. Of late she
had sometimes wondered if, after all, she had had the right to do as
she had done in accepting the public shame, and in not proclaiming
the truth: if to act for one’s own heart, feelings, and life alone, no
matter how perfect the honesty, is not a sort of noble cruelty, or cruel
nobility; an egotism which obeys but its own commandments, finding its
own straight and narrow path by first disbarring the feelings and lives
of others. Had she done what was best for the child? Misgiving upon this
point made her heart ache bitterly. Was life then but a series of trist
condonings at the best, of humiliating compromises at the worst?
She repeated her question to Ranulph now. “You haven’t ambition any
longer?”
“I’m busy building ships,” he answered evasively. “I build good ships,
they tell me, and I am strong and healthy. As for being connetable, I’d
rather help prisoners free than hale them before the Royal Court.
For somehow when you get at the bottom of most crimes--the small ones
leastways--you find they weren’t quite meant. I expect--I expect,” he
added gravely, “that half the crimes oughtn’t to be punished at all; for
it’s queer that things which hurt most can’t be punished by law.”
“Perhaps it evens up in the long end,” answered Guida, turning away from
him to the fire, and feeling her heart beat faster as she saw how the
child nestled in Ranulph’s arms--her child which had no father. “You
see,” she added, “if some are punished who oughtn’t to be, there are
others who ought to be that aren’t, and the worst of it is, we care so
little for real justice that we often wouldn’t punish if we could. I
have come to feel that. Sometimes if you do exactly what’s right, you
hurt some one you don’t wish to hurt, and if you don’t do exactly what’s
right, perhaps that some one else hurts you. So, often, we would rather
be hurt than hurt.”
With the last words she turned from the fire and involuntarily faced
him. Their eyes met. In hers were only the pity of life, the sadness,
the cruelty of misfortune, and friendliness for him. In his eyes was
purpose definite, strong.
He went over and put the child in its high chair. Then coming a little
nearer to Guida, he said:
“There’s only one thing in life that really hurts--playing false.”
Her heart suddenly stopped beating. What was Ranulph going to say? After
all these years was he going to speak of Philip? But she did not reply
according to her thought.
“Have people played false in your life--ever?” she asked.
“If you’ll listen to me I’ll tell you how,” he answered. “Wait, wait,”
she said in trepidation. “It--it has nothing to do with me?”
He shook his head. “It has only to do with my father and myself. When
I’ve told you, then you must say whether you will have anything to do
with it, or with me.... You remember,” he continued, without waiting for
her to speak, “you remember that day upon the Ecrehos--five years ago?
Well, that day I had made up my mind to tell you in so many words what I
hoped you had always known, Guida. I didn’t--why? Not because of another
man--no, no, I don’t mean to hurt you, but I must tell you the truth
now--not because of another man, for I should have bided my chance with
him.”
“Ranulph, Ranulph,” she broke in, “you must not speak of this now! Do
you not see it hurts me? It is not like you. It is not right of you--”
A sudden emotion seized him, and his voice shook. “Not right! You should
know that I’d never say one word to hurt you, or do one thing to wrong
you. But I must speak to-day-I must tell you everything. I’ve thought of
it for four long years, and I know now that what I mean to do is right.”
She sat down in the great arm-chair. A sudden weakness came upon her:
she was being brought face to face with days of which she had never
allowed herself to think, for she lived always in the future now.
“Go on,” she said helplessly. “What have you to say, Ranulph?”
“I will tell you why I didn’t speak of my love to you that day we went
to the Ecrehos. My father came back that day.”
“Yes, yes,” she said; “of course you had to think of him.”
“Yes, I had to think of him, but not in the way you mean. Be patient a
little while,” he added.
Then in a few words he told her the whole story of his father’s
treachery and crime, from the night before the Battle of Jersey up to
their meeting again upon the Ecrehos.
Guida was amazed and moved. Her heart filled with pity. “Ranulph--poor
Ranulph!” she said, half rising in her seat.
“No, no--wait,” he rejoined. “Sit where you are till I tell you all.
Guida, you don’t know what a life it has been for me these four years. I
used to be able to look every man in the face without caring whether he
liked me or hated me, for then I had never lied, I had never done a mean
thing to any man; I had never deceived--nannin-gia, never! But when my
father came back, then I had to play a false game. He had lied, and to
save him I either had to hold my peace or tell his story. Speaking was
lying or being silent was lying. Mind you, I’m not complaining, I’m not
saying it because I want any pity. No, I’m saying it because it’s the
truth, and I want you to know the truth. You understand what it means to
feel right in your own mind--if you feel that way, the rest of life is
easy. Eh ben, what a thing it is to get up in the morning, build your
fire, make your breakfast, and sit down facing a man whose whole life’s
a lie, and that man your own father! Some morning perhaps you forget,
and you go out into the sun, and it all seems good; and you take your
tools and go to work, and the sea comes washing up the shingle, and you
think that the shir-r-r-r of the water on the pebbles and the singing of
the saw and the clang of the hammer are the best music in the world. But
all at once you remember--and then you work harder, not because you love
work now for its own sake, but because it uses up your misery and makes
you tired; and being tired you can sleep, and in sleep you can forget.
Yet nearly all the time you’re awake it fairly kills you, for you feel
some one always at your elbow whispering, ‘you’ll never be happy
again, you’ll never be happy again!’ And when you tell the truth
about anything, that some one at your elbow laughs and says: ‘Nobody
believes--your whole life’s a lie!’ And if the worst man you know passes
you by, that some one at your elbow says: ‘You can wear a mask, but
you’re no better than he, no better, no--“’
While Ranulph spoke Guida’s face showed a pity and a kindness as deep
as the sorrow which had deepened her nature. She shook her head once or
twice as though to say, Surely, what suffering! and now this seemed to
strike Ranulph, to convict him of selfishness, for he suddenly
stopped. His face cleared, and, smiling with a little of his old-time
cheerfulness, he said:
“Yet one gets used to it and works on because one knows it will all come
right sometime. I’m of the kind that waits.”
She looked up at him with her old wide-eyed steadfastness and replied:
“You are a good man, Ranulph.” He stood gazing at her a moment without
remark, then he said:
“No, ba su, no! but it’s like you to say I am.” Then he added suddenly:
“I’ve told you the whole truth about myself and about my father. He did
a bad thing, and I’ve stood by him. At first, I nursed my troubles and
my shame. I used to think I couldn’t live it out, that I had no right
to any happiness. But I’ve changed my mind about that-oui-gia! As I
hammered away at my ships month in month out, year in year out, the
truth came home to me at last. What right had I to sit down and brood
over my miseries? I didn’t love my father, but I’ve done wrong for him,
and I’ve stuck to him. Well, I did love--and I do love--some one else,
and I should only be doing right to tell her, and to ask her to let me
stand with her against the world.”
He was looking down at her with all his story in his face. She put out
her hand quickly as if in protest and said:
“Ranulph--ah no, Ranulph--”
“But yes, Guida,” he replied with stubborn tenderness, “it is you I
mean--it is you I’ve always meant. You have always been a hundred times
more to me than my father, but I let you fight your fight alone. I’ve
waked up now to my mistake. But I tell you true that though I love you
better than anything in the world, if things had gone well with you
I’d never have come to you. I never came, because of my father, and I’d
never have come because you are too far above me always--too fine, too
noble for me. I only come now because we’re both apart from the world
and lonely beyond telling; because we need each other. I have just one
thing to say: that we two should stand together. There’s none ever can
be so near as those that have had hard troubles, that have had bitter
wrongs. And when there’s love too, what can break the bond! You and I
are apart from the world, a black loneliness no one understands. Let us
be lonely no longer. Let us live our lives together. What shall we care
for the rest of the world if we know we mean to do good and no wrong? So
I’ve come to ask you to let me care for you and the child, to ask you
to make my home your home. My father hasn’t long to live, and when he is
gone we could leave this island for ever. Will you come, Guida?”
She had never taken her eyes from his face, and as his story grew her
face lighted with emotion, the glow of a moment’s content, of a fleeting
joy. In spite of all, this man loved her, he wanted to marry her--in
spite of all. Glad to know that such men lived--and with how dark
memories contrasting with this bright experience-she said to him once
again: “You are a good man, Ranulph.”
Coming near to her, he said in a voice husky with feeling: “Will you be
my wife, Guida?”
She stood up, one hand resting on the arm of the great chair, the other
half held out in pitying deprecation.
“No, Ranulph, no; I can never, never be your wife--never in this world.”
For an instant he looked at her dumfounded, then turned away to the
fireplace slowly and heavily. “I suppose it was too much to hope for,”
he said bitterly. He realised now how much she was above him, even in
her sorrow and shame.
“You forget,” she answered quietly, and her hand went out suddenly to
the soft curls of the child, “you forget what the world says about me.”
There was a kind of fierceness in his look as he turned to her again.
“Me--I have always forgotten--everything,” he answered. “Have you
thought that for all these years I’ve believed one word? Secours d’la
vie, of what use is faith, what use to trust, if you thought I believed!
I do not know the truth, for you have not told me; but I do know, as I
know I have a heart in me--I do know that there never was any wrong in
you. It is you who forget,” he added quickly--“it is you who forget. I
tried to tell you all this before; three years ago I tried to tell you.
You stopped me, you would not listen. Perhaps you’ve thought I did not
know what has happened to you every week, almost every day of your life?
A hundred times I have walked here and you haven’t seen me--when you
were asleep, when you were fishing, when you were working like a man
in the fields and the garden; you who ought to be cared for by a man,
working like a slave at man’s work. But, no, no, you have not thought
well of me, or you would have known that every day I cared, every day I
watched, and waited, and hoped--and believed!”
She came to him slowly where he stood, his great frame trembling with
his passion and the hurt she had given him, and laying her hand upon his
arm, she said:
“Your faith was a blind one, Ro. I was either a girl who--who deserved
nothing of the world, or I was a wife. I had no husband, had I? Then I
must have been a girl who deserved nothing of the world, or of you. Your
faith was blind, Ranulph, you see it was blind.”
“What I know is this,” he repeated with dogged persistence--“what I know
is this: that whatever was wrong, there was no wrong in you. My life a
hundred times on that!”
She smiled at him, the brightest smile that had been on her face these
years past, and she answered softly: “‘I did not think there was so
great faith--no, not in Israel!’” Then the happiness passed from her
lips to her eyes. “Your faith has made me happy, Ro--I am selfish, you
see. Your love in itself could not make me happy, for I have no right to
listen, because--”
She paused. It seemed too hard to say: the door of her heart enclosing
her secret opened so slowly, so slowly. A struggle was going on in her.
Every feeling, every force of her nature was alive. Once, twice, thrice
she tried to speak and could not. At last with bursting heart and eyes
swimming with tears she said solemnly:
“I can never marry you, Ranulph, and I have no right to listen to your
words of love, because--because I am a wife.”
Then she gave a great sigh of relief; like some penitent who has for
a lifetime hidden a sin or a sorrow and suddenly finds the joy of a
confessional which relieves the sick heart, takes away the hand of
loneliness that clamps it, and gives it freedom again; lifting the poor
slave from the rack of secrecy, the cruelest inquisition of life and
time. She repeated the words once more, a little louder, a little
clearer. She had vindicated herself to God, now she vindicated herself
to man--though to but one.
“I can never marry you; because I am a wife,” she said again. There
was a slight pause, and then the final word was said: “I am the wife of
Philip d’Avranche.”
Ranulph did not speak. He stood still and rigid, looking with eyes that
scarcely saw.
“I had not intended telling any one until the time should come”--once
more her hand reached out and tremblingly stroked the head of the
child--“but your faith has forced it from me. I couldn’t let you go
from me now, ignorant of the truth, you whose trust is beyond telling.
Ranulph, I want you to know that I am at least no worse than you thought
me.”
The look in his face was one of triumph, mingled with despair, hatred,
and purpose--hatred of Philip d’Avranche, and purpose concerning him. He
gloried now in knowing that Guida might take her place among the honest
women of this world,--as the world terms honesty,--but he had received
the death-blow to his every hope. He had lost her altogether, he who had
watched and waited; who had served and followed, in season and out of
season; who had been the faithful friend, keeping his eye fixed only
upon her happiness; who had given all; who had poured out his heart like
water, and his life like wine before her.
At first he only grasped the fact that Philip d’Avranche was the husband
of the woman he loved, and that she had been abandoned. Then sudden
remembrance stunned him: Philip d’Avranche, Duc de Bercy, had another
wife. He remembered--it had been burned into his brain the day he saw
it first in the Gazette de Jersey--that he had married the Comtesse
Chantavoine, niece of the Marquis Grandjon-Larisse, upon the very day,
and but an hour before, the old Duc de Bercy suddenly died. It flashed
across his mind now what he had felt then. He had always believed that
Philip had wronged Guida; and long ago he would have gone in search of
him--gone to try the strength of his arm against this cowardly marauder,
as he held him--but his father’s ill-health had kept him where he was,
and Philip was at sea upon the nation’s business. So the years had gone
on until now.
His brain soon cleared. All that he had ever thought upon the matter
now crystallised itself into the very truth of the affair. Philip had
married Guida secretly; but his new future had opened up to him all
at once, and he had married again--a crime, but a crime which in high
places sometimes goes unpunished. How monstrous it was that such vile
wickedness should be delivered against this woman before him, in whom
beauty, goodness, power were commingled! She was the real Princess
Philip d’Avranche, and this child of hers--now he understood why she
allowed Guilbert to speak no patois.
They scarcely knew how long they stood silent, she with her hand
stroking the child’s golden hair, he white and dazed, looking, looking
at her and the child, as the thing resolved itself to him. At last, in
a voice which neither he nor she could quite recognise as his own, he
said:
“Of course you live now only for Guilbert.”
How she thanked him in her heart for the things he had left unsaid,
those things which clear-eyed and great-minded folk, high or humble,
always understand. There was no selfish lamenting, no reproaches, none
of the futile banalities of the lover who fails to see that it is no
crime for a woman not to love him. The thing he had said was the thing
she most cared to hear.
“Only for that, Ranulph,” she answered.
“When will you claim the child’s rights?”
She shook her head sadly. “I do not know,” she answered with hesitation.
“I will tell you all about it.”
Then she told him of the lost register of St. Michael’s, and about
the Reverend Lorenzo Dow, but she said nothing as to why she had kept
silence. She felt that, man though he was, he might divine something of
the truth. In any case he knew that Philip had deserted her.
After a moment he said: “I’ll find Mr. Dow if he is alive, and the
register too. Then the boy shall have his rights.”
“No, Ranulph,” she answered firmly, “it shall be in my own time. I must
keep the child with me. I know not when I shall speak; I am biding my
day. Once I thought I never should speak, but then I did not see all,
did not wholly see my duty towards Guilbert. It is so hard to find what
is wise and just.”
“When the proofs are found your child shall have his rights,” he said
with grim insistence.
“I would never let him go from me,” she answered, and, leaning over, she
impulsively clasped the little Guilbert in her arms.
“There’ll be no need for Guilbert to go from you,” he rejoined, “for
when your rights come to you, Philip d’Avranche will not be living.”
“Will not be living!” she said in amazement. She did not understand.
“I mean to kill him,” he answered sternly.
She started, and the light of anger leaped into her eyes. “You mean to
kill Philip d’Avranche--you, Maitre Ranulph Delagarde!” she exclaimed.
“Whom has he wronged? Myself and my child only--his wife and his child.
Men have been killed for lesser wrongs, but the right to kill does not
belong to you. You speak of killing Philip d’Avranche, and yet you dare
to say you are my friend!”
In that moment Ranulph learned more than he had ever guessed of life’s
subtle distinctions and the workings of a woman’s mind; and he knew that
she was right. Her father, her grandfather, might have killed Philip
d’Avranche--any one but himself, he the man who had but now declared his
love for her. Clearly his selfishness had blinded him. Right was on his
side, but not the formal codes by which men live. He could not avenge
Guida’s wrongs upon her husband, for all men knew that he himself had
loved her for years.
“Forgive me,” he said in a low tone. Then a new thought came to him. “Do
you think your not speaking all these years was best for the child?” he
asked.
Her lips trembled. “Oh, that thought,” she said, “that thought has made
me unhappy so often! It comes to me at night as I lie sleepless, and I
wonder if my child will grow up and turn against me one day. Yet I did
what I thought was right, Ranulph, I did the only thing I could do. I
would rather have died than--”
She stopped short. No, not even to this man who knew all could she speak
her whole mind; but sometimes the thought came to her with horrifying
acuteness: was it possible that she ought to have sunk her own
disillusions, misery, and contempt of Philip d’Avranche, for the child’s
sake? She shuddered even now as the reflection of that possibility came
to her--to live with Philip d’Avranche!
Of late she had felt that a crisis was near. She had had premonitions
that her fate, good or bad, was closing in upon her; that these days in
this lonely spot with her child, with her love for it and its love for
her, were numbered; that dreams must soon give way for action, and this
devoted peace would be broken, she knew not how.
Stooping, she kissed the little fellow upon the forehead and the eyes,
and his two hands came up and clasped both her cheeks.
“Tu m’aimes, maman?” the child asked. She had taught him the pretty
question.
“Comme la vie, comme la vie!” she answered with a half sob, and caught
up the little one to her bosom. Now she looked towards the window.
Ranulph followed her look, and saw that the shades of night were
falling.
“I have far to walk,” he said; “I must be going.” As he held out his
hand to Guida the child leaned over and touched him on the shoulder.
“What is your name, man?” he asked.
He smiled, and, taking the warm little hand in his own, he said: “My
name is Ranulph, little gentleman. Ranulph’s my name, but you shall call
me Ro.”
“Good-night, Ro, man,” the child answered with a mischievous smile.
The scene brought up another such scene in Guida’s life so many years
ago. Instinctively she drew back with the child, a look of pain crossing
her face. But Ranulph did not see; he was going. At the doorway he
turned and said:
“You know you can trust me. Good-bye.”