David Fleming's Forgiveness

by Margaret M. Robertson

Chapter Four.

The Fleming Children.

Instead of following the path, Clifton went round the knoll to the brook, and paused again at the sight of a pair or two of little bare feet in the water, and thus began his acquaintance with the Fleming children. There were several of them, but Clifton saw first a beautiful brown boyish face, and a pair of laughing eyes half hidden by a mass of tangled curls, and recognised Davie. Close beside the face was another so like it, and yet so different, that Clifton looked in wonder. The features were alike, and the eyes were the same bonny blue, and the wind was making free with the same dark curls about it. But it was a more delicate face, not so rosy and brown, though the sun had touched it too. There was an expression of sweet gravity about the mouth, and the eyes that were looking up through the leaves into the sky had no laughter in them. It was a fair and gentle face, but there was something in it that made Clifton think of stern old Mr Fleming sitting on the Sabbath-day among his neighbours in the church.

“That must be sister Lizzie’s wee Katie,” said Clifton to himself.

The slender girlish figure leaned against the rock on which the boy was lying so that the two faces were nearly on a level, and a pretty picture they made together. Clifton had been making facetious remarks to his sister about the old-fashioned finery of the dressed-up village girls on their way to church, but he saw nothing to criticise in the straight, scant dress, of one dim colour, unrelieved by frill or collar, which Katie Fleming wore. He did not think of her dress at all, but of the slim, graceful figure and the bonny girlish face turned so gravely up to the sky. He was not sure whether it was best to go forward and speak or not. Ben stood still, looking also.

“I say, Katie,” said the boy, lifting his head, “what is the seven-and-twentieth?”

“Oh fie, Davie! to be thinking of propositions and such-like worldly things, and this the Sabbath-day,” said Katie, reprovingly.

“Just as if you werena thinking of them yourself, Katie.”

“No, I’m no’ thinking of them. They come into my head whiles. But I’m no’ fighting with them, or taking pleasure in them, as I do other days. I’m just resting myself in this bonny quiet place, looking at the sky and the bonny green grass. Eh, Davie, it’s a grand thing to have the rest and the quietness of the Sabbath-day.”