"Where is Steenie?"
"Well on to a place of safety by this time."
"God protect him!" she murmured.
The soldiers soon surrounded our house. Three of them entered and searched it. We had hurried the bairn to bed and bidden him turn his face to the wall, and on no account show that he was awake, rightly thinking they would not be likely to wake him. Mother and I suffered much from their insolence, and they bore away with them whatever they chose to take, otherwise we came to no harm.
After this Steenie was almost lost to us for a long time. It was very seldom he could be found in the places where he was wont to be concealed, so diligent was the search for those who had fought at Rullion Green.
Sometimes we saw him at conventicles. These meetings were then held in unfrequented places, and often under the cover of darkness. Precious was the divine message to our long-waiting souls, and our thoughts were uplifted by the power of the truth. But with me the feeling of exaltation would subside, leaving in my heart a weary waste, a dread uncertainty, a fearful looking forward to some unknown yet certain evil. In God was my trust; but humanity is frail, and the sickness of heart that attends blighted hopes was often mine to bear.
On the few occasions when I saw my brother I observed that he grew wan and pale—that he had at times a look almost amounting to fierceness. Naturally ambitious, he chafed at his inactivity, and was tormented by a throng of unfulfilled desires. Although we hoped he had been born into the kingdom of grace, and was willing to follow where Providence led, still the natural man struggled against the submission that was to keep him in hiding.
The bonnie summer months had passed, the cool and pleasant autumn also, and winter was again upon us. Not a few were pinched with hunger, for oppression had wrung from many families nearly all their means of subsistence. We often thought of Steenie and prayed for him; but we knew not where he was, as the cold had driven him from all his old haunts.
One wild December night we sat by our comfortable fire: without, the hoarse wind roared in strange tones and in loud blasts that were fearful even to those who were comfortably housed. I was looking at the window opposite me, and almost reproaching myself for receiving so many comforts since they were denied to Steenie. Just then some one knocked at the door. I felt at once that it was my wandering brother; and so it was. But oh, how changed! He had been driven by actual hunger to venture home. The man whom we had employed to carry food to him, and whom we had liberally paid, even to the abatement of our own comforts, had proved faithless.