No one can desire a sweeter walk than through a Scottish pine wood
in late September, where you breathe the healing resinous air, and
the ground is crisp and springy beneath your feet, and gentle
animals dart away on every side, and here and there you come on an
open space with a pool, and a brake of gorse. Many a time on market
days Flora had gone singing through these woods, plucking a posy of
wild flowers and finding a mirror in every pool, as young girls
will; but now she trembled and was afraid. The rustling of the trees
in the darkness, the hooting of an owl, the awful purity of the
moonlight in the glades, the cold sheen of the water, were to her
troubled conscience omens of judgment. Had it not been for the
kindness of Peter Bruce, which was a pledge of human forgiveness,
there would have been no heart in her to dare that wood, and it was
with a sob of relief she escaped from the shadow and looked upon the
old glen once more, bathed from end to end in the light of the
harvest moon. Beneath her ran our little river, spanned by its
quaint old bridge; away on the right the Parish Kirk peeped out from
a clump of trees; half way up the glen the clachan lay surrounded by
patches of corn; and beyond were the moors, with a shepherd's
cottage that held her heart. Two hours ago squares of light told of
warmth and welcome within; but now, as Flora passed one house after
another, it seemed as if every one she knew was dead, and she was
forgotten in her misery. Her heart grew cold, and she longed to lie
down and die, when she caught the gleam of a lighted window. Some
one was living still to know she had repented, and she knelt down
among the flowers with her ear to the glass to hear the sound of a
human voice. Archie Moncur had come home late from a far-away job,
but he must needs have worship with his sister before they went to
bed, and well did he choose the psalm that night. Flora's tears
rained upon the mignonette as the two old people sang:
"When Sion's bondage God turned back,
As men that dreamed were we,
Then filled with laughter was our mouth,
Our tongue with melody;"
while the fragrance of the flowers went up as incense unto God.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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