As Miriam stood upon the little mound within the shadow of her roof-tree, eagerly scanning the moors for Matt's return, cool airs laden with moorland scents played around her, and masses of snowy cloud sailed along the horizon, flushing beneath the touch of the after-glow with as pure a rose as that mantling on her womanly face. The blue distances overhead were deepening with sundown, and the great sweeps of field and wild were sombre with the hill shadows that began to fall. In a copse near where she stood a little bird was busy with her fledglings, and from a meadow came the plaintive bleat of a late yeaned lamb. From the distant village the wind carried to her ears the cry of an infant--a cry that lingered and echoed and started strange melodies in the awakening soul of Miriam. Child of the hills as she was, never before in all her thirty years of familiarity with them, and freedom among them, had she seen and felt them as now. A great and holy passion was upon her, and she took all in through the medium of its golden haze. The early flowers at her feet glowed like stars of hope and promise--and the bursting buds of the trees told of spring's teeming womb and dew of youth; while the shadow of her cottage gable and chimney--falling as it did across the little mound on which she stood--recalled to her the promises of Him who setteth the solitary in families. Then she returned to herself, and to her new and opening world of maternity. No longer would she be the butt at which the rude, though good-natured, jests of her neighbours were thrown, for she too would soon hold up her head proudly among the mothers of Rehoboth. And as for Matt's mother--fierce Calvinist that she was, and whom in the past she had so much feared--what cared she for her now? She would cease to be counted by her as one of the uncovenanted, and told that she had broken the line of promise given to the elect. How well she remembered the night when the old woman, taking up the Bible, read out aloud: 'The promise is unto you, and to your children,' afterwards clinching the words by saying: 'Thaa sees, Miriam, thaas noan in it, for thaa's no childer'; and how, when she gently protested, 'But is not the promise to all that are afar off?' the elect sister of the church and daughter of God destroyed her one ray of hope by saying: 'Yi! but only to as mony as the Lord aar God shall co.' And Matt--poor Matt--across whom the cold shadow had so long lain, and which, despite his love of her, would creep now and again like a cloud over the sunshine of his face--Matt, too, would be redeemed from his long disappointment, and renewed in strength as he saw a purpose in his life's struggle, even the welfare of his posterity. These thoughts, and many others, all passed through Miriam's mind as she stood looking out from the mound upon the sundown moors.