There she sat down and leaned her chin on her hand, and gazed silently at the whispering Loch.
Was she glad or sad?
She hardly knew.
She could not forget the unmistakable admiration in his eyes, and yet—and yet—
“Like midges coming from nowhere and vanishing nowhere, or wits hurrying and scurrying over an ant-hill,” she repeated vaguely. “Ah! he could not have meant that—surely—surely he could not... For if so, what could one ant be to him more than another?”
For a moment her heart was heavy, then she remembered his fondness for his mother and took comfort again.
“It is only that someone or something has disappointed him,” she told herself, “and it has made him bitter and cynical, but it is only a passing mood. By and by he will change again, and perhaps I can help him.
“Yes,” her eyes glowed softly, “perhaps I can help him to find faith again, and to be happy instead of hard and indifferent.”
The stars came out and a crescent moon hung over the mountains.
The night was gloriously beautiful—gloriously still—and a deep restfulness stole over her spirit. In the deep, silent depths of her Celtic imagination, in which dwelt ever paramount, before all, that divine love of beauty which imbues a too often prosaic world with a vague wonder of loveliness, and fair promise, she saw only the heights to which men might rise, and the power of goodness, and held to her ideals in the face of all destroying.