Presently, the silent group heard footsteps behind, and when Grace glanced round she saw a woman, with two little boys by her side, coming along the little path towards the headstone. She stopped suddenly when she saw the strangers, evidently surprised by the unusual presence of visitors in that unfrequented spot, and, turning down another path, went away in the opposite direction. "Who is that, Jean?" asked Mrs. Foster; "surely I have seen the face before."
"Dear heart, do ye not know her? It's Elsie Gray. We dinna think, John and me, that her bonnie face is much changed; but then we see it every day," Jean replied, looking fondly after the retreating figure.
"Ah, is it really Elsie? I was just going to ask about her, Jean. But who are those children with her? I thought you told me in one of your letters that she lived quite alone?" asked Grace, stooping down to pluck a bluebell from Geordie's grave, instead of hurrying after this old friend, as the little Grace expected her mother to do.
Then the little matron went on to narrate how Elsie's home was still the forester's pretty cottage, though her father and mother were both dead. She had never been married, which Jean remarked was a great pity, and hinted that a good many other people were of her opinion. But how the parish of Kirklands could ever have got on without her if she had gone away, or what life would be if she had not Elsie to go to in every joy and sorrow, Jean could not imagine, as she said she frequently remarked to "her John." Nobody's hands seemed to be fuller of helpful work, and nobody did it more cheerily, than Elsie Gray.
Then Jean explained that the two little boys were orphans whom she had taken to her comfortable home; and "it wasn't the first pair o' laddies she had made good for something," Jean added, admiringly.
"Oh, mamma, don't you want to speak to her? She has such a nice, beautiful face. Do let me run after her, and ask her to stop for a minute," said little Grace, eagerly.
Mrs. Foster glanced musingly across the knolls at Elsie's slender figure, as she sauntered peacefully home with her charge, and then she said, "No, my dear, we shall not trouble Elsie to-night; but I shall take you with me to see her in her own home to-morrow, if you wish it. I shall be going there."
The cold, grey light was beginning to steal over the woods of Kirklands, and the rosy tints that still hovered about the knolls would soon give place to the gloom of night, so Grace gathered her little party, and turned her steps towards the river.
The merry voices, hushed for a time, began again to resound through the still evening air, and the children went hurrying on with Jean, who had told them she must be going home to see after the milking of her cows, and cordially responded to their wish to join her at the process.
So Grace had been following slowly, and when she crossed the stepping-stones, she looked lingeringly back, for, with the sound of the rippling water had come the remembered echoes of Geordie's voice as she heard it first. Then she called to mind the chilly spring day when she had started on the search, pronounced so hopeless by old Adam the gardener, and how gleefully she hailed the unexpected appearance of the little herd-boy. She smiled as she remembered the childish eagerness that made her fear that he would not appear at Kirklands, as he had promised, and his rather reproachful reply that he "Aye keepit his trysts." And then there rose mingled memories of those trysts, which be had so faithfully kept in the little still-room, of her own childish incapacity for the work she had so longed to do, and of the sense of failure that hung over it so long.