“At least leave the innocent bairn,” said Miss Eelen in a voice of solemn command. “A day like this should be like a Lord’s day in a house.”
“Or worse,” Mary added with tremendous seriousness—“for the Sabbath comes once in a week, but your mother’s funeral but once in a lifetime.”
The words came surging back into Kirsteen’s mind again—
“True loves I may get many an ane,
But minnie ne’er anither.”
Her heart felt as if it must burst, and yet it was something like a laugh that broke from her, as she was thus reproached for levity. “I am not likely to forget that,” she said. Jeanie clung to her as she left the others to their antiphone. The sound of the familiar linn seemed to have come back to dominate all sounds as before, when she stole out at the back of the house, Jeanie always following. It was a grey mild wintry day, a day such as is consolatory to the overwrought spirit. The two sisters seated themselves on the fallen trunk of a tree on the bank near the head of the linn. The softened rush of the water with no storm and but little wind in the air filled the atmosphere with a soothing hush of sound. Jeanie laid her head upon her sister’s knee, hiding her face, and sobbing softly like a child in its mother’s lap when the storm of woe is overpast; Kirsteen who had no tears at her command save those that welled quietly into her eyes from time to time without observation, smoothed tenderly with one hand the girl’s soft and beautiful hair.
“Just sob out all your heart,” she said, “my little Jeanie—it will do you good.”
“Oh, Kirsteen, it is not all for her, but for me too that am so forlorn.”
“Jeanie, my dear, it’s a hard thing to say, but soon ye will not be so forlorn. We will all go back to our common work, and your heart will maybe not be light again for many a long day; but the sun will begin to shine again.”
“Kirsteen,” said Jeanie raising her head, “you are my sister next to me, and I am a woman grown. There is not such a long, long way between us; but you speak as if it was a hundred years.”
“It is more I think,” said Kirsteen; “for you will have all that life can give, and I will have nothing, except maybe you, and being a stand-by for the family as my mother said.”