They looked sadly one towards another, as if each were anxious that the other should communicate the tidings. Her eldest son took her hand, and said mournfully, "Come into the house, mother."
Their sorrowfu looks, their dejected manner, told her but too plainly her husband's fate.
"He is dead!" she cried, in a tone o' heart-piercing solitariness and sorrow, as she accompanied them into the house, where she had beheld them equip themselves for battle.
"My father is dead," said Alexander, her youngest; "but he died bravely, mother, in the cause in which ye glory, and in which a' Scotland glories; and, to the deeds done by his hand on the day he fell, we, in a great measure, owe the freedom o' our country, and the security o' the Covenant."
She clasped her hands together, and sat down and wept.
"Mother," said her sons, gathering round her, "dinna mourn."
She rose, she wept upon their necks from the eldest to the youngest. "Ye hae lost a faither," said she, "whose loss to ye nane but thae wha kenned him at his ain fireside can estimate; and I hae lost hae husband, who, for eight-and-thirty years, has been dearer to me than the licht o' the sun, for wherever he was, there was aye sunlicht upon my heart. But his life has been laid down in a cause worthy o' the first martyrs. I hae endeavoured to pray—'Thy will be done;' and pray for me, bairns, that I may submit to that will without repining, for the stroke is heavy, and nature is weak."
Again she sat down and wept, and now she lifted her hands in prayer, and again she wrung them in the bereavement o' widowhood, saying, "O my Alexander!—my husband!—shall I never, never see ye again?" And her sons gathered round her, to comfort her.
On the day following, Alexander, the youngest o' the sons o' Alice, went towards Polwarth, in the hope o' obtaining an interview with Flora Stuart, whom he had not seen for several months; for, from the time that he had joined the Covenanting army on Dunse Law, her father had forbidden him his house. He spoke o' him as the young traitor, and forbade Flora, at her peril, to speak to him again. But, as the sang says,
Love will venture in where it daurna weel be seen;