"Cordelia, what is it?" he cried, in startled wonder.
"Motherhood!" said Cordelia, inadequately, through her tears--"it--it is such an awful thing!"
And then she fled from him, and he sat up late into the night, thinking.
And from the gloomy caves of Mem'ry came The bandits of Repentance in the night And left her naked, and in spirit torn.
Every Klondike of achievement has its Chilkoot of adversity.--"The Silver Poppy."
The next afternoon they were on the Grand Battery, leaning against one of the obsolete old mortars that frowned down over the river. A calm sky of robin's-egg blue stretched over them. Golden and quiet as were the Laurentides about them, there was a touch of chilliness in that clear, northern air, a muffled coldness which Hartley likened to a naked saber-blade buried in rose-leaves. The wide St. Lawrence lay beneath them like a pool of silver. In the remoter distance stretched the blue and purple foot-hills of the Laurentians themselves.
Miles beneath them they could see the valleys of gloomy greenness, dotted with their little flashing whitewashed _habitant_ houses, and over everything the mellow, autumnal sunlight lay; over the gray walls of the Citadel, burning like fire on the windows and spires, gemming the long hillside sloping down to the river, making opals and pearls of the little sails and softening the very grimness of the dark and more distant headlands frowning so sternly out over the peaceful water.
It had been a day full of quiet happiness for both of them, and a feeling of vague regret, of languid sorrow, fell over them, as they stood in silence, looking on the beauty of river and foot-hill and mountain bathed in autumnal silence and gold.
"Oh, if we never grew old!" Cordelia said, with a wistful little shake of the head, drawing closer to Hartley, and slipping her hand through his arm.
He looked down at her with a strange sternness that was not all sternness in his eyes. She turned away, gazing across the wide stretch of river dotted with its shifting opals and pearls.
She did not answer. Her musing eyes were far away, on a drifting bank of gray cloud that was slowly shrouding the glory of the sunset and bringing with it a breath of colder wind.