Chapter 29

STORY OF THE EGYPTIAN.

God gives us more than, were we not overbold, we should dare to
ask for, and yet how often (perhaps after saying "Thank God" so
curtly that it is only a form of swearing) we are suppliants again
within the hour. Gavin was to be satisfied if he were told that no
evil had befallen her he loved, and all the way between the
school-house and Windyghoul Babbie craved for no more than Gavin's
life. Now they had got their desires; but do you think they were
content?

The Egyptian had gone on her knees when she heard Gavin speak of
her. It was her way of preventing herself from running to him.
Then, when she thought him gone, he opened the door. She rose and
shrank back, but first she had stepped toward him with a glad cry.
His disappointed arms met on nothing.

"You, too, heard that I was dead?" he said, thinking her
strangeness but grief too sharply turned to joy.

There were tears in the word with which she answered him, and he
would have kissed her, but she defended her face with her hand.

"Babbie," he asked, beginning to fear that he had not sounded her
deepest woe, "why have you left me all this time? You are not glad
to see me now?"

"I was glad," she answered in a low voice, "to see you from the
window, but I prayed to God not to let you see me."

She even pulled away her hand when he would have taken it. "No,
no, I am to tell you everything now, and then--"

"Say that you love me first," he broke in, when a sob checked her
speaking.

"No," she said, "I must tell you first what I have done, and then
you will not ask me to say that. I am not a gypsy."

"What of that?" cried Gavin. "It was not because you were a gypsy
that I loved you."

"That is the last time you will say you love me," said Babbie.
"Mr. Dishart, I am to be married to-morrow."

She stopped, afraid to say more lest he should fall, but except
that his arms twitched he did not move.

"I am to be married to Lord Rintoul," she went on. "Now you know
who I am."

She turned from him, for his piercing eyes frightened her. Never
again, she knew, would she see the love-light in them. He plucked
himself from the spot where he had stood looking at her and walked
to the window. When he wheeled round there was no anger on his
face, only a pathetic wonder that he had been deceived so easily.
It was at himself that he was smiling grimly rather than at her,
and the change pained Babbie as no words could have hurt her. He
sat down on a chair and waited for her to go on.

"Don't look at