Page:Hope--Sophy of Kravonia.djvu/347

TRUE TO HER LOVE He started towards her with an eager gesture of protest. She raised her hand and checked him.

"No, I've decided nothing. I can't tell yet," she said. She turned and left him; he heard her steps descending the old winding stair which led from the top of the wall down into the street. He did not know whether he would see her alive again—and with her message of such ambiguous meaning he went to Dunst anbury. Yet curiously, though he had pleaded so urgently with her, though to him her death would mean the loss of one of the beautiful things from out the earth, he was in no distress for her and did not dream of attempting any constraint. She knew her strength—she would choose right. If life were tolerable, she would take up the burden. If not, she would let it lie unlifted at her quiet feet.

His mood could not be Dunstanbury's, who had come to count her presence as the light of the life that was his. Yet Dunstanbury heard the message quietly, and quietly made every preparation in obedience to her bidding. That done, he sat in the little room of the inn and smoked his pipe with Basil. Henry Brown waited his word to take the horses to the door of the church. Basil Williamson had divined his friend's feeling for Sophy, and wondered at his calmness.

"If I felt the doubt that you do, I shouldn't be calm," said Dunstanbury. "But I know her. She will be true to her love."

He could not be speaking of that love of hers which was finished, whose end she was now mourning in the little church. It must be of another love that he spoke—of one bred in her nature, the outcome of her temperament and of her being the woman that she was. The spirit which had brought 329