So he made just the kind of companion for Annie that she delighted in. When he found himself thus giving her pleasure he felt hopeful—nay, sure—that in the end his suit would be successful.
It was indeed a beautiful morning. Soft and balmy winds sighing through the dark pine tree tops, a sky of moving clouds, with many a rift of darkest blue between, birds singing on the bonnie silver birches, their wild, glad notes sounding from every copse, the linnet on the yellow patches of whins or gorse that hugged the ground and perfumed the air for many a yard around, and the wild pigeon murmuring his notes of love in every thicket of spruce. Rare and beautiful wildflowers everywhere, such as never grow in England, for every country has its own sweet flora.
The little party returned a few minutes before one o’clock, not only happy, but hungry too. To her great alarm Annie found her uncle still sitting on his chair, but seemingly in a stupor of grief. Near his chair lay a foolscap letter.
“Oh, uncle dear, are you ill?”
“No, no, child. Don’t be alarmed; it has pleased God to change our fortunes, that is all, and I have been praying and trying hard to say ‘Thy will be done on earth as it is in Heaven,’—I cannot yet. I may ere long.”
But Annie was truly alarmed. She picked up the lawyer’s letter and read it twice over ere she spoke. And her bonnie face grew ghastly pale now.
“Oh, uncle dear,” she said at last, “what does this mean? Tell me, tell me.”
“It means, my child, that we are paupers in comparison to the state in which we have lived for many years. That this mansion and grounds are no longer our own, that I must sell horses and hounds and retire to some small cottage on the outskirts of the city—that is all.”
“Cheer up, uncle,” said Annie, sitting down on his knee with an arm round his neck, as she used to do when a child. “You still have me, and I have you. If we can but keep Jeannie we may be happy yet, despite all that fate can do.”
“God bless you, my child! You have indeed been a comfort to me. But for you, I’d care nothing for poverty. I may live for ten years and more yet, to the age of my people and clansmen, but as contentedly in a cottage as in a castle. God has seen fit to afflict us, but in His mercy He will temper the wind to the shorn lamb.”