She was my poor brother Isaac's only child. After her
mother was taken, he, poor fellow, went altogether to the bad, and until
she came here she mostly lived among strangers. It's been a wretched
sort of childhood for her--a wretched sort of childhood. Ye'll take care
of her, Anthony, will ye not? ... Nay, but I could not hev wished for a
better man for her, and there's my hand on 't.'
'Thank ee, Mr. Blencarn, thank ee,' Anthony answered huskily, gripping
the old man's hand.
And he started off down the lane homewards.
His heart was full of a strange, rugged exaltation. He felt with a
swelling pride that God had entrusted to him this great charge--to tend
her; to make up to her, tenfold, for all that loving care, which, in her
childhood, she had never known. And together with a stubborn confidence
in himself, there welled up within him a great pity for her--a tender
pity, that, chastening with his passion, made her seem to him, as he
brooded over that lonely childhood of hers, the more distinctly
beautiful, the more profoundly precious. He pictured to himself,
tremulously, almost incredulously, their married life--in the winter,
his return home at nightfall to find her awaiting him with a glad,
trustful smile; their evenings, passed together, sitting in silent
happiness over the smouldering logs; or, in summer-time, the midday rest
in the hay-fields when, wearing perhaps a large-brimmed hat fastened
with a red ribbon, beneath her chin, he would catch sight of her,
carrying his dinner, coming across the upland.
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