“Oh, Miss Annie,” said Jeanie, “I think you are very, very foolish. You refuse to marry this honest and faithful man, but your mourning will not, cannot restore the dead. Reginald Grahame is happier, a thousand, million times more happy, than anyone can ever be on this earth. Besides, dear, there is another way of looking at the matter. Your poor Uncle McLeod is miles and miles from the pines, from the heath and the heather. He may not complain, but the artificial life of a city is telling on him. What a quiet and delightful life he would have at Laird Fletcher’s!”
Annie was dumb. She was thinking. Should she sacrifice her young life for the sake of her dear uncle? Ah, well, what did life signify to her now? He was dead and gone.
Thus she spoke:
“You do not think my uncle is ill, Jeannie?”
“I do not say he is ill, but I do say that he feels his present life irksome at times, and you may not have him long, Miss Annie. Now go to sleep like a baby and dream of it.”
And I think Annie cried herself asleep that night.
“It becomes not a maiden descended from the noble clan McLeod to be otherwise than brave,” she told herself next morning. “Oh, for dear uncle’s sake I feel I could—” But she said no more to herself just then.
Fletcher called that very day, and took them away again to his bonnie Highland home. It was a day that angels would have delighted in. And just on that same seat beneath the same green-branched cedar Fletcher renewed his wooing. But he, this time, alluded to the artificial city life that the old Laird had to lead, he who never before during his old age had been out of sight of the waving pines and the bonnie blooming heather.
Fletcher was very eloquent to-day. Love makes one so. Yet his wooing was strangely like that of Auld Robin Grey, especially when he finished plaintively, appealingly, with the words: