As I lay on the shady side of an alder bank watching our folk at their gambols, I found a serenity that again set me at my ease with the Provost’s daughter. I gathered even the calmness to invite her to sit beside me, and she made no demur.
“You are short of reapers, I think, by the look of them,” she said; “I miss some of the men who were here last year.”
They were gone with MacCailein, I explained, as paid volunteers.
“Oh! those wars!” she cried sadly. “I wish they were ended. Here are the fields, good crops, food and happiness for all, why must men be fighting?”
“Ask your Highland heart,” said I. “We are children of strife.”
“In my heart,” she replied, “there’s but love for all. I toss sleepless, at night, thinking of the people we know—the good, kind, gallant; merry lads we know—waging savage battle for something I never had the wit to discover the meaning of.”
“The Almighty’s order—we have been at it from the birth of time.”
“So old a world might have learned,” she said, “to break that order when they break so many others. Is his lordship likely to be back soon?”
“I wish he might be,” said I, with a dubious accent, thinking of the heather above the myrtle and MacCailein’s head on a post “Did you hear of the Macaulay beldame shot by Roderick?”
“Yes,” she said; “an ugly business! What has that to do with MacCailein’s home-coming?”