They walked on in silence for a little way. Some of the reapers were going homeward in the soft evening light; there was a great wain being loaded a field or two off, and the voices of men and women sounded clear and musical through the summer stillness.
"Would you be sorry for a man who had brought trouble on himself from his own folly, from his own wrong-doing, Hilda?" Bothwell asked presently.
"I should be all the more sorry for him on that account," she answered gently.
"Yes, you would pity him. Such women as you and Dora are angels of compassion. They never withhold their pity; but it is tempered with scorn. They despise the sinner, even while they are merciful to him."
"You ought not to say that. I am not given to despising people. I am too conscious of my own shortcomings."
"You are an angel," said Bothwell piteously. "O Hilda, how much I have lost in life--how many golden opportunities I have wasted!"
"There are always other opportunities to be found," answered the girl, trying to speak words of comfort, vaguely, hopelessly, in her utter ignorance of his griefs or his perplexities. "There is always the future, and the chance of beginning again."
"Yes, in Queensland, in the Fijis, in Peru. If you mean that I may some day learn to make my own living, I grant the possibility. Queensland or Peru may do something for me. But my chances of happiness, my chances of renown--those are gone for ever. I lost all when I left the army. At seven-and-twenty I am a broken man. Hard for a man to feel that this life is all over and done with before he is thirty."
"I fancy there must be a time in every life when the clouds seem to shut out the sun; but the darkness does not last for ever," said Hilda softly. "I hope the cloud may pass from your sky."
"Ah, if it would, Hilda--if that cloud could pass and leave me my own man again, as I was nine years ago, before I went to India!"
"You seemed to be very happy last winter--in the hunting season," said Hilda, trying to speak lightly, though her heart was beating as furiously as if she had been climbing a mountain.
"Yes, I was happy then. I allowed myself to forget. I did not know just then that the trouble I had taken upon my shoulders was a lifelong trouble. Yes, it was a happy time, Hilda, last winter. How many a glorious day we had together across country! You and I were always in the first flight, and generally near each other. Our horses were always such good friends, were they not? They loved to gallop neck-and-neck. O my darling, I was indeed happy in those days--unspeakably happy."
