Winsome's wet eyes, with the lashes curving long over the under side of the dark-blue iris, were turned full on him now with the tenderness of a kindred pity.
"Do you know I think that your father was once kind to my mother. Grandmother began once to tell me, and then all at once would tell me no more--I think because grandfather was there."
"I did not know that my father ever knew your mother," answered Ralph.
"Of course, he would never tell you if he did," said the woman of experience, sagely; "but grandmother has a portrait in an oval miniature of your father as a young man, and my mother's name is on the back of it."
"Her maiden name?" queried Ralph.
Winsome Charteris nodded. Then she said wistfully: "I wish I knew all about it. I think it is very hard that grandmother will not tell me!"
Then, after a silence which a far-off cuckoo filled in with that voice of his which grows slower and fainter as the midsummer heats come on, Winsome said abruptly, "Is your father ever hard and-- unkind?"
Ralph started to his feet as if hastily to defend his father. There was something in Winsome's eyes that made him sit down again--something shining and tender and kind.
"My father," he said, "is very silent and reserved, as I fear I too have been till I came down here" (he meant to say, "Till I met you, dear," but he could not manage it), "but he is never hard or unkind, except perhaps on matters connected with the Marrow kirk and its order and discipline. Then he becomes like a stone, and has no pity for himself or any. I remember him once forbidding me to come into the study, and compelling me to keep my own garret- room for a month, for saying that I did not see much difference between the Marrow kirk and the other kirks. But I am sure he could never be unkind or hurtful to any one in the world. But why do you ask, Mistress Winsome?"
"Because--because--" she paused, looking down now, the underwells of her sweet eyes brimming to the overflow--"because something grandfather said once, when he was very ill, made me wonder if your father had ever been unkind to my mother."
Two great tears overflowed from under the dark lashes and ran down Winsome's cheek. Ralph was on the right side of the branch now, and, strangely enough, Winsome did not seem to notice it. He had a lace-edged handkerchief in his hand which had been his mother's, and all that was loving and chivalrous in his soul was stirred at the sight of a woman's tears. He had never seen them before, and there is nothing so thrilling in the world to a young man. Gently, with a light, firm hand, he touched Winsome's cheek, instinctively murmuring tenderness which no one had ever used to him since that day long ago, when his mother had hung, with the love of a woman who knows that she must give up all, over the cot of a boy whose future she could not foresee.