“WENT GLIDING AWAY LIKE A BEAUTIFUL GHOST.”
“They bid me forget her—oh, how can it be?
In kindness or scorn she’s ever wi’ me;
I feel her fell frown in the lift’s frosty blue,
An’ I weel ken her smile in the lily’s saft hue.
I try to forget her, but canna forget,
I’ve liket her lang, an’ I aye like her yet.”
Thom, the Inverury Poet.
ICHARDS, the kindly old solicitor, with Jack and his sister Flora and the general—these formed the group in the solemn, dark-panelled library of Grantley Hall on that beautiful summer’s evening. The light of the westering sun stole in through the high stained windows, and cast patches of light and colour on the furniture and on the floor. Mackenzie had already told his son all the story of his troubles, and while he had yet been talking, the curtains in the doorway were drawn back, and Flora appeared, leaning on the arm of her good friend Richards.
The general had lifted up a deprecating hand.
“No need, no need.” This from the family lawyer. “Flora already knows all. And bravely has she borne the tidings. Ah, my good sir, Flora is a true Mackenzie.”
“But you might have told me long ago,” was all she had said as she seated herself on a low stool by her father’s knee. “O father, I could have borne it, and could have comforted you, now that poor mother has gone!”
There was silence for a time, broken by Flora’s low sobbing; broken, too, by the sweet, mellow fluting of a blackbird in the garden shrubbery.
General Mackenzie was the first to speak.
“Children,” he said, “I have been for many a day like one living in a dream, call it if you will a fool’s paradise. But I have awakened at last to the stern realities of life. It is better, perhaps, as it is, for we now know the very worst. You will believe me when I say that if I have hidden the truth from you, it was because I feared to vex you, or render you unhappy, while yet there was hope. But now,” he added, “all is over, all is lost, or seems to be.”