Every movement, as the hour of departure approached, brought a fresh pang to the tender heart of Mary. She had parted with her pets and household cares. Her tame owl she had cast loose, and she watched him as he winged his way back to his eyrie in the ruined tower, from which Robert Wodrow in happier times had brought him.
Wearily and sadly she had all the dear familiar spots, and the cottars who dwelt among them, to visit for the last time—hard and shrivelled hands to press and children to kiss. How should she ever get through it all?
She picked up a few daisies from the graves where her parents lay, and placed them between the leaves of her Bible, and then it seemed as if there was nothing more to do.
The evening seemed painfully sweet and silent and still when the sisters quitted their home for the last time, and to Mary it seemed that even 'the grasshoppers were silent in the grass.'
The keys were to be handed over by Elspat Gordon to a clerk of Mr. Luke Sharpe's when he chose to come for them. Elspat received the instructions drowned in tears, and as a spell against evil put in her pocket some grains of wheat, as it is, or was, a superstition in Scotland that in every grain there is the representation of a human face, said to be that of the Saviour, and hence the efficacy of the spell.
In the railway-carriage Jack crouched at Mary's feet, and, looking up in her eyes, whined and whimpered, for dogs have strange instincts. All that was left to the sisters of Birkwoodbrae was the bunch of freshly-gathered roses which each carried in her hand, and many times did Mary bury her hot and tear-stained face among their cool and fragrant leaves.
'Good-bye!' she whispered in her heart to many an inanimate but familiar object, as it seemed to fly past and vanish, till the darkness of descending night shrouded all the scenery. Then Mary closed her eyes, and strove to think, while the clanking train glided swiftly and monotonously on.
The past, the present, and the future, so far as Colville was concerned, seemed to have melted into thinest air; or perhaps the past alone, with its brief life and glow of love and hope, thrust itself poignantly forward.