Chapter Six.
Kenneth.
Scene: Glen Alva in a winter garb. A morning in December. A glorious morning and yet how great a change from the day before. For on the west coast of Scotland changes do come soon and sudden.
Last night, ere gloaming fell, Kenneth had stood at his mother’s cottage door for hours watching the sunset and the weird but splendid after-glow.
The sun had gone down rosy red and large behind a grey-blue bank of rock-and-tower clouds that bounded the horizon above the hills. But so strange and beautiful was the colour that soon spread over the firmament, with its tints of lavender, yellow, pink, and pale sea-green, that even Kenneth’s mother must hold up her hands and cry,—
“Oh! dear laddie, a sky like that, I fear, bodes no good to the glen.”
For uppermost in every one’s mind in Glen Alva, at the present time, was the threatened eviction.