She searched until she found the scar of the sabre-cut.
“Just where I thought to find it!” she said. “That was a terrible day; worse for me than for you, Duncan.”
“You saw me then!” I exclaimed.
“Little do folks know,” she answered, “who think I’m lying here like a live corpse in its coffin, what liberty my soul—and that’s just me—enjoys. Little do they know what I see and hear. And there’s no witchcraft or evil-doing in it, my boy; but just what the Almighty made me. Janet, here, declares she heard the cry that I made, when this same cut, that’s no so well healed yet, broke out in your bonny head. I saw no sword, only the bursting of the blood from the wound. But sit down, my bairn, and have something to eat after your walk. We’ll have time enough for speech.”
Janet had laid out the table with fare of the old homely sort, and I was a boy once more as I ate the well-known food. Every now and then I glanced towards the old face. Soon I saw that she was asleep. From her lips broke murmured sounds, so partially connected that I found it impossible to remember them; but the impression they left on my mind was something like this,
“Over the water. Yes; it is a rough sea—green and white. But over the water. There is a path for the pathless. The grass on the hill is long and cool. Never horse came there. If they once sleep in that grass, no harm can hurt them more. Over the water. Up the hill.” And then she murmured the words of the psalm: “He that dwelleth in the secret place.”
For an hour I sat beside her. It was evidently a sweet, natural sleep, the most wonderful sleep of all, mingled with many a broken dream-rainbow. I rose at last, and, telling Janet that I would return in the evening, went back to my quarters; for my absence from the mid-day meal would have been a disappointment to the household.
When I returned to the cottage, I found Margaret only just awaked, and greatly refreshed. I sat down beside her in the twilight, and the following conversation began:
“You said, nurse, that, some time ago, you could not see me. Did you know nothing about me all that time?”
“I took it to mean that you were ill, my dear. Shortly after you left us, the same thing happened first; but I do not think you were ill then.”