——
CHAPTER II.
The simple funeral was over; the last look had been taken, and little Alice McLane was hidden from the weeping eyes that still turned toward her lowly resting-place, as if yet unwilling to leave her alone beneath that cold, cold sod.
Donald and Margaret McLane had been very happy until now—too happy perhaps. They had loved each other in early years, and when Donald had earned enough by his own honest labor to purchase the cottage on Burnside Moor, they were married without a shadow on their young, hopeful hearts.
Margaret was a careful housewife, and Donald had ever a warm welcome and comfortable home when, wearied with his daily toil, he came back to her whom he had promised to love and cherish; and when little Alice came to gladden the young mother’s lonely hours while he was away, sunshine reigned in the household. In all their happiness they never forgot who gave them all their blessings, and daily was their morning and evening sacrifice of praise sent up to their Heavenly Father in confiding and child-like simplicity.
A cherished flower was Ally McLane, with her bright blue eyes sparkling with joy and affection, her round, dimpled, rosy cheeks, and baby tones, so sweet to a parent’s ear; her mother’s sunny spirit seemed hers from her very birth until the heavy hand of sickness came down to hush those happy notes, and dim the light of health and joyousness that ever danced around her.
Perhaps she was too fondly loved; perhaps their hearts clung with too much of idolatry to their only one; and a watchful Father saw that the ties must be loosened. While yet her lisping tones seemed ringing in their ears; while yet the flush of health lingered on her cheek, the dart of the spoiler came, and with scarce a pang of suffering to rend the mother’s heart with deeper anguish, little Ally was taken away from the ill to come.
Overwhelming as was the blow, a mitigation was sent with it. The stranger babe thus thrown upon Margaret’s tenderness, proved a solace which nothing else could have afforded, and in the cares attendant upon her new charge, the dreary sense of loneliness, following the loss of a loved one, was robbed of half its power.
Many were the wondering surmises of Donald and his wife, in reference to the manner in which the babe had been thus given to them. The dark mantle in which it had been closely enfolded, had first attracted Donald’s attention amid the snow-drifts, for the little forsaken one was already wrapped in that fatal slumber which, if not soon broken, knows no waking—and the young man’s heart was melted with kindly sympathy as he thought of his own darling, so he raised the light burden from its soft but dangerous resting-place, bore it to gentle and tender hands—and as days, and weeks, and months wore away, no one appearing to claim the lost one, closer and closer their hearts were wound about her, till their love seemed even as that they had borne their own angel Ally—as they called her.
Sometimes Margaret would almost forget that her second Ally was not, indeed, the very same as that one they had laid with such heart-yearnings beneath the snow-clad turf; and yet the two were very unlike. The face of the stranger was full of earnest thought. Her large, dark, liquid eyes, so full of dreamy tenderness, beamed with almost spiritual beauty; and a hasty word would bring the tears to her eyes, the warm blush to her cheek, and a strange imploring expression over her whole countenance; whereas her elder namesake was ever a joyous child, light and graceful, full of the heedlessness so natural to her tender age—and few things there were that had power to dim her sunny spirit.