"I always do. I always think of you as if you were my own, my very own, relation, and do call you 'Auntie.' Will that do?" and Margaret bent and kissed her.
"Oh!" said Mrs. Dorriman with a sigh, "you do not know how sweet it is to have some one to love you. I have had so little affection all my life, and sometimes it makes me feel a little forlorn. I think having a sister must be such an enormous comfort."
"Sometimes," said Margaret, "and sometimes a great anxiety; of course, few ties can come up to it," she added, hastily, afraid of allowing even Mrs. Dorriman to know the intense and bitter disappointment Grace was to her.
They arrived at Inchbrae, and, if Margaret had admired it at all before, she could not help being still more enthusiastic about all now. Can anything in nature excel the charm of a well-kept flower-garden with its gay flower-beds and velvet lawn, and a background of pines with their red stems glowing in the sunset, and a magnificent range of rocks behind it; while through the delicate and graceful birch-trees glimpses of the sea in all its changing beauty and capricious moods is there to give that sense of the Infinite which raises our thoughts above and beyond it all?
Margaret's eyes filled with sudden tears. The loveliness of it all touched and soothed her, and yet she was nearly weeping. She seemed all at once to see that she had hitherto missed something in her life which was now given her. She put up her hand as Mrs. Dorriman was going to speak, and asked, in the lowered tone of one who is conscious of being moved and charmed beyond expression, what the noise was near them?
"It sounds like a river; it is distinct from the solemn thud of the sea I hear breaking on the rocks."
"It is the river; that is the sound I missed so much when I went to Renton," answered Mrs. Dorriman, full of the delight of having Margaret's sympathy.
"It has a rushing mighty sound like the wings of a relentless fate," said Margaret, dreamily; "I never was so near a river before."
"Do you like being so near it? Some people think it disturbs them; that louder noise through all is the waterfall. Come and have some tea now, and, when you are rested, we will go by the river-walk."
"Everything is so lovely," she exclaimed, as she followed Mrs. Dorriman into the bright little drawing-room, and noticed the pretty freshness of everything.