‘Is it cheering, think you,’ said Brion, levelling his voice, ‘to have cherished a friend, and to have been forsaken by him without a word?’ The other did not answer for a moment. ‘Nay,’ he said softly, ‘I left a message for thee to be of good heart, and to keep a corner in it for me. An William gave it thee not, I will break his head for him.’ ‘Spare thy bluster. Hurt to another would not mend mine. Besides he gave me thy message.’ ‘What then, sweetling? I had to go.’ ‘And I to be deserted.’ ‘The occasion was peremptory. No choice was left to me.’ ‘Save to wake me and say good-bye.’ ‘O!’ cried Clerivault, apostrophising Fate in a voice of grief and despair: ‘what coil is this! _I_ wake thee to that message! If I have sinned, I have sinned in good faith, and my reward is my love is rejected.’ ‘I said not that,’ said Brion, relenting. ‘But, indeed, Clerivault, it wounded me to the heart to find you gone.’ ‘Did it? did it?’ cried the other, in a rapture of emotion. ‘Then happy, happy Harlequin for all his racking! If thou but knewest, my blessed one--if thou but knewest, thou wouldst sure forgive me. But the peril--if peril it was--is laid at last, and henceforth, by God’s countenance, we shall live together in security, and never more be disparted. When we rode away that night----’ ‘Nay,’ said the boy, stopping him, a flush on his face--‘whither or on what urgency I will not know. If I might not hear the exordium, I will not hear the peroration. We were separated and we have rejoined, like the sides of a wound. That should be enough for us. The interval of pain it is well to forget, as if it had never been. I prithee speak no word of it more. Is my Uncle returned with you?’ ‘He is within,’ answered Clerivault. He was comforted but perplexed. There was some change apparent here which he could not quite unriddle. It was like a new birth, a detachment, as when a clinging tuber has separated itself from its parent stock and declared for an independent existence. There was a pride in it of conscious power; the old sweet pliancy might be there, but its backbone had strengthened. Was he become a man indeed in this short space? It would almost seem so. There was a shadow on his lip; a knowledge, even a sadness, in his eyes which had not been there before. Whence and how had they come? The thought which had been Phineas’s thought just crossed his mind. Well, he did not know whether to be glad or sorry for this development; only thank God they were together again, and reconciled, and friends as of old.