But the thought of having to go away did not seem so terrible to her as it would have done a few months ago. Her courage had risen since then. She had “come to herself,” and she was reasonable both in her fears and her hopes, and so she repeated, as she laid her head on her pillow:
“I will be thankful and have patience and wait. And I will put my trust in God.”
Chapter Fifteen.
“She courtsied low, she spoke him fair,
She sent him on his way;
She said as she stood smiling there,
You’ve wealth, and wiles, and wisdom rare,
But I have won the day.”
Crombie did not leave the manse with an easy mind, and the more he thought of what he had said, and what he had not said there, the more uneasy he became. He was in a quandary, he told himself, putting the accent on the last “a.” To his surprise and consternation he found himself in doubt as to the course he ought to pursue.
He had gone to the manse with the full intention of asking the minister’s lass whether she were the wife of the man whom he had seen “glowering at the new headstane” in the kirkyard of Kilgower, and of putting it to her conscience whether she was not breaking the laws of God and man by keeping herself hidden out of his way.
But he had not asked her. He could not do it. He had come away without a word, and now he was saying to himself that the man who through soft-heartedness, or through the influence of carnal affection, suffered sin in another, thus being unfaithful to a sinful soul in danger, was himself a sinner. He ought to have spoken, he told himself. He could not be called upon to tell the story to another, but to Allison herself he should have spoken. If her conscience needed to be wakened, he sinned against her in keeping silence. It might have been to prepare him for this very work that he had been sent to lay his Eppie down in that faraway kirkyard.
Saunners stood still on the hillside when he got thus far. Ought he to go back again? He could not be sure. The thought of the first glimpse he had got that night of Allison sitting quiet and busy with her work, with a look of growing content upon her face that had once been so gloomy and sad, came back to him, and he moved on again.