Summer winds are sighing and whispering among the silver birch trees, and their drooping branches, nodding, kiss the murmuring stream. There is a wealth of wild flowers everywhere—great banks of brambles starred over with pink-white blooms, and great banks of green and feathery breckans, up through which tower the crimson-belled stalks of the beautiful foxglove.
Musing on the story I have just completed, lulled by the river’s lisping song, and mournful croodle of the wild pigeons in the dark spruce thicket, I have almost dropped into dreamland. But I start as a hand is laid on my shoulder. I start and stand up.
No need to be frightened. It is only Janet who confronts me—Janet, with her silvery hair, her mild eyes, and chastened face.
“Janet,” I say, “I have finished my story—your story.”
“The story of our boy,” says Janet, musingly, almost sadly. “And,” she adds, “you have told all about the death of my dear Dowager Lady, and how Claude never cares now to visit Dunallan Towers? Have you told how weeds now grow in the great old garden, and dark, dank nettles where the roses bloomed? How owls usurp the place of the pigeons in the ivied battlements? How on the drear, dark days of autumn the raven flaps—”
“Stay, Janet, stay,” I cry; “no trace of melancholy or gloom must tinge my last pages. Look, Janet, look up. What does yonder sky forebode, evil or good?”
It was the parting rays of the setting sun I pointed to, gleaming red upon a lovely reach of water far down the strath, and lighting up the dark pine trees and the hills that o’ertopped them with a glory not their own. It lighted up old Janet’s face, too, and her locks of silvery-grey, until her face shone—radiant.
“Ah!” she murmured, “that sky bodes a bright to-morrow.”
So, too, shall the sunset of your life and of mine be, dear reader, if our lives are spent in the discharge of duty—be it high, be it low—and if our hearts are ever brightened with a hope that is not of this world, but lies in—the Far Beyond.