Christian fiction; Neighborhoods -- Scotland -- Fiction
purple and green; with its dashes of storm, and its foggy glooms; with its
white-winged aspirations, its dull-red passions, its creeping envies in
brown and black and earthy yellow. But from all the accusations of my
conscience, I would turn me to the Lord, for he was called Jesus because he
should save his people from their sins. Then I thought what a grand gift it
would be to give his people the power hereafter to fight the consequences
of their sins. Anyhow, I would trust the Father, who loved me with a
perfect love, to lead the soul he had made, had compelled to be, through
the gates of the death-birth, into the light of life beyond. I would cast
on him the care, humbly challenge him with the responsibility he had
himself undertaken, praying only for perfect confidence in him, absolute
submission to his will.
I rose from my seat beside the praying monk, and walked on. The thought of
seeing my own people again filled me with gladness. I would leave those
I had here learned to love with regret; but I trusted I had taught them
something, and they had taught me much; therefore there could be no end
to our relation to each other--it could not be broken, for it was _in the
Lord_, which alone can give security to any tie. I should not, therefore,
sorrow as if I were to see their faces no more.
I now took my farewell of that sea and those cliffs. I should see them
often ere we went, but I should not feel so near them again. Even this
parting said that I must "sit loose to the world"--an old Puritan phrase,
I suppose; that I could gather up only its uses, treasure its best things,
and must let all the rest go; that those things I called mine--earth, sky,
and sea, home, books, the treasured gifts of friends--had all to leave
me, belong to others, and help to educate them. I should not need them. I
should have my people, my souls, my beloved faces tenfold more, and could
well afford to part with these. Why should I mind this chain passing to
my eldest boy, when it was only his mother's hair, and I should have his
mother still?
So my thoughts went on thinking themselves, until at length I yielded
passively to their flow.
I found Wynnie looking very grave when I went into the drawing-room. Her
mother was there, too, and Mr. Percivale. It seemed rather a moody party.
They wakened up a little, however, after I entered, and before dinner was
over we were all chatting together merrily.
"How is Connie?" I asked Ethelwyn.
"Wonderfully better already," she answered.
"I think everybody seems better," I said. "The very idea of home seems
reviving to us all."
Wynnie darted a quick glance at me, caught my eyes, which was more than
she had intended, and blushed; sought refuge in a bewildered glance at
Percivale, caught his eye in turn, and blushed yet deeper. He plunged
instantly into conversation, not without a certain involuntary sparkle in
his eye.
"Did you go to see Mrs. Stokes this morning?" he asked.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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