"Your heart is touched, Katie Stewart, touched with the calm and pathos of great joy; and tears lie under your eyelashes, like the dew on flowers. Clasp your white hands on the sill of the window—heed not that your knees are unbended—and say your child's prayers with lips which move but utter nothing audible, and with your head bowed on the moonbeam, which steals into your window like a bird. True, you have said these child's prayers many a night, as in some sort a charm, to guard you as you slept; but now there comes upon your spirit an awe of the great Father yonder, a dim and wonderful apprehension of the mysterious Son in whose name you make those prayers. Is it true, then, that he thinks of all our loves and sorrows, this One, whose visible form realizes to us the dim, grand, glorious heaven—knows us by name—remembers us with the God's love in his wonderful human heart;—us, scattered by myriads over his earth, like the motes in the sunbeam? And the tears steal over your cheeks, as you end the child's prayer with the name that is above all names.
"Now, will you rest? But the moon has mastered all her hilly way of clouds, and from the full sky looks down on you, Katie, with eyes of pensive blessedness like your own. Tarry a little—linger to watch that one bright spot on the Firth, where you could almost count the silvered waves as they lie beneath the light.
"But a rude sound breaks upon the stillness—a sound of flying feet echoing over the quiet road; and now they become visible—one figure in advance, and a band of pursuers behind—the same brave heart which spent its strength to-day to warn the unconscious ship—the same strong form which Katie has seen in her dreams on the quarter-deck of the Flower of Fife;—but he will never reach that quarter-deck, Katie Stewart, for his strength flags, and they gain upon him.
"Gain upon him, step by step, unpitying bloodhounds!—see him lift up his hands to you, at your window, and have no ruth for his young hope, or yours;—and now their hands are on his shoulder, and he is in their power.
"'Katie!' cries the hoarse voice of Willie Morison, breaking the strange fascination in which she stood, 'come down and speak to me ae word, if ye wouldna break my heart. Man—if ye are a man—let me bide a minute; let me say a word to her. I'll maybe never see her in this world again.'
"The miller stood at the open door—the mother within was wiping the tears from her cheeks. 'Oh Katie, bairn, that ye had been sleeping!' But Katie rushed past them, and crossed the burn.
"What can they say?—only convulsively grasp each other's hands—wofully look into each other's faces, ghastly in the moonlight; till Willie—Willie, who could have carried her like a child, in his strength of manhood—bowed down his head into those little hands of hers which are lost in his own vehement grasp, and hides with them his passionate tears.
"'Willie, I'll never forget ye,' says aloud the instinctive impulse of little Katie's heart, forgetting for the moment that there is any grief in the world but to see his. 'Night and day I'll mind ye, think of ye. If ye were twenty years away, I would be blither to wait for ye, than to be a queen. Willie, if ye must go, go with a stout heart—for I'll never forget ye, if it should be twenty years!'
"Twenty years! Only eighteen have you been in the world yet, brave little Katie Stewart; and you know not the years, how they drag their drooping skirts over the hills when hearts long for their ending, or how it is only day by day, hour by hour, that they wear out at length, and fade into the past.
"'Now, my man, let's have no more of this,' said the leader of the gang. 'I'm not here to wait your leisure; come on.'