She clasped her hands together tightly. "If he could!--if only he could forget--I would not care how much I remembered."
[EPILOGUE.]
It was once more autumn. The rowans were as red, the heather as purple, as it had been in the year when Jeanie Duncan had sate for her portrait and Marjory Carmichael had taken her holiday; as red, as purple, as both will be until--
"The slow sea rise and the sheer cliff crumble,
Till terrace and meadow the deep gulfs drink,
Till the strength of the waves of the high tides humble
The fields that lessen, the rocks that shrink."
For Nature is supremely indifferent whether she gives birth to fools or knaves, or whether the Great Reaper fills his sheaf with wheat or tares.
The evening shadows were lengthening in the Glen, and from the little school-house by the horse-chestnut tree the cadence of children's voices rose and fell over the stirring measure of a processional hymn.
"Not so fast! not so fast! who told you to gallop it like that?" cried a smartly dressed young woman at the harmonium; a young lady with that curious resemblance to a commonplace book, which the profession of teaching brings to all but clever faces.