Flora Annie Webster Steel

“ In the one case you must remain yourself, in the other you, being nonexistent, cannot suffer chance or change. It is the same with death. If there is no you to survive, death itself ceases to be since you are non-existent. If there is, you must remain yourself."
"Surely, my dear Miss Marjory," said the Reverend James, breaking in on the girl's half-questioning appeal, "we are to be changed in the twinkling of an eye?"
"And marriage, Miss Carmichael?" put in Paul, quietly, passing by the last remark as if it, too, had been non-existent. "You left out marriage in your philosophy." ”

“ Is it my fault if I do things quicker than other people? Is it my fault if I see things more clearly? You think I am always managing, managing; and so I am. How can I help it when, everything keeps coming into my mind, and no one thinks or cares?"
"My dear Violet! You have been overworking, indeed. You must take it easier, or we shall be having you laid up----"
"And then what would Paul Macleod do?" she went on, with a reckless laugh. "No! I won't make myself so disagreeable as all that--if I can help it, Paul; but how can one help being disagreeable at times when one is wise--wise and old? ”

“ And the evening shadows were lengthening also along the white road that curves and crests the points and bays of the loch. A glint of light where Paul had stood like St. Christopher, a deeper shadow where Marjory had sate listening to the blabbing of the waves. Light and shadow mingled in the woods, through which they had run hand in hand, though with every moment the sunset glow left some golden birch or scarlet cherry; and down among the tall, silver firs by the house a faint white mist was beginning to rise over the trim lawns. ”

“ When she woke the sun was streaming in at the open window--for she was one of those to whom the close atmosphere of English houses is unendurable--and she curled herself round comfortably in her bed to consider the new aspect of affairs before rising to face them. In a way she was to be pitied, for in sending Paul Macleod to Kashmir, in order to buy a silk carpet, she had really touched the highest point of self-abnegation of which she was capable. She had done it to save him; for what? For this colourless girl who would never understand his odd mixture of sentimentality and worldliness? ”

“ Vane took it with a gracious smile.
"Bach! Corelli! This is yours, I suppose, Miss Woodward?"
"No! I don't play," replied Alice, and Mrs. Vane turned instantly to the flyleaf.
"There are no songs in that book," remarked Paul, black as thunder, laying his hands on the volume. "Not that it matters--for Mrs. Vane used not to need music----"
"Nor does she now," retorted the little lady, laughing, as she sate down, saying as she did so, in an undertone, "Does Marjory Carmichael play Bach well, Paul? I hope so; he is dreadful when murdered." ”

“ Adam, my love! go and shake hands' with your little visitors," said Lady George, keeping an apprehensive eye on Blazes, who, with his legs very far apart, was clacking the whip he had brought down with him, and making extraordinary cluckings in the roof of his mouth, like a whole bevy of broody hens, in which occupation, what with his close-cropped hair and white smock, he looked a carter to the life. "Really, nurse!" she continued nervously; "I think, perhaps, it would be better. He is so much younger than the others, you see, Lady Hooker." ”

“ There is no greater test of the quality of a man's fibre than the way in which he stands the goad of mental pain. Paul Macleod, smarting under the sting which the certain knowledge that he loved Marjory Carmichael as he had never loved any woman before and yet that she was beyond his reach brought to him, showed this indubitably. All his reckless self-will, all his wild resentment against controlling circumstance, rose up in him, and only the fact that he had no possible opportunity of so doing, prevented him from then and there making his proposal to Alice Woodward. ”

“ Marjory, my dear! Fate has given you a real holiday at last! Of course, I am an incorrigible idler compared to you, but, believe me, my heart has ached at times over your sense of duty! Life is not all work, even if it is not all beer and skittles. So take the goods the gods provide (as dear old Wilson would say in the proper tongue--my Latin is merely a catalogue of dry bones) --put away all the books--let two and two be five or five hundred for the time, while you cross the Asses' Bridge with the rest of humanity. Wake up, my dear little girl! ”

“ It seemed to fill the world with unrest, even though the house lay still as the grave; for Mrs. Cameron and the lassies were away at the milking. She covered her ears to shut out the sound and bent closer to her book, until suddenly she found herself blindfolded by a pair of strong, slender, supple hands--hands that could not be mistaken for an instant.
"Tom!" she cried. "Oh, Tom! is it you?"
"Tom it is," said a voice with a pleasant intonation scarcely foreign, and yet assuredly not wholly English. "E' bene! Mademoiselle Grands-serieux! So this is the way you hold high holiday?" ”

“ Swimming has always an effortless look, and the sweeping stream, carrying him down, remorselessly aided the illusion, so that not even Marjory, with her knowledge of the tide, guessed how nearly Paul Macleod's strength was spent as his hand touched the gunwale. But touch it he did, and the next moment, with Sam's help, he was aboard and busy at the sail, while Alice Woodward, deeming the danger over, began to cry helplessly, and even Marjory breathed again. ”

“ There was no denying of the truth possible to her clear sight, and as she sate on the last day of October, on the last day of holiday before she and little Paul set off together to make acquaintance with a new world, she laid down her pen in the middle of a sentence in the letter she was writing to Tom Kennedy, and looked out over the stormy whitecrested waves of the loch set in its rampart of grey, snow-powdered, mist-shrouded hills, and wondered how she could have been so blind for so long. Blind to half the great problems of life! ”

“ The rowans were as red, the heather as purple, as it had been in the year when Jeanie Duncan had sate for her portrait and Marjory Carmichael had taken her holiday; as red, as purple, as both will be until--
"The slow sea rise and the sheer cliff crumble,
Till terrace and meadow the deep gulfs drink,
Till the strength of the waves of the high tides humble
The fields that lessen, the rocks that shrink."
For Nature is supremely indifferent whether she gives birth to fools or knaves, or whether the Great Reaper fills his sheaf with wheat or tares. ”

“ Yes, Marjory, I've seen such romantic young fools many a time. I see a good deal of that sort of thing necessarily in my profession. It is human nature."
"I suppose so," she said curtly. "Well, I suppose I ought to go and dress. Oh, Tom! why couldn't Lady George have put it off, and why won't you let me stay at home?"
"Because, when, after infinite toil, you have caught a netful of mankind for theatricals, you naturally choose the next day for a dance. And because a girl ought to go to a ball. How can she tell her metier if she only keeps to one? Besides, it is your holiday." ”

“ Cameron had considered the keystone of the laird's position. It was a dim, dignified room, with a dreadful bed. So large, so square, so evenly surrounded with Macleod tartan hangings that a sleeper immured therein might well on waking lose his airs, and which way he was lying. A bed which might have a dozen ghostly occupants, and the flesh and blood one be none the wiser of those dead and gone lairds of Gleneira. Marjory, oppressed by the very look of it, threw the windows, wide as they would set, to the air and sunshine. ”

“ Paul himself had denied seeing it, and after all, despite his kindness, he was the last person to have sympathy with her ideals; yet such sympathy was the only thing which could make her care for him or his society. She told herself all this, over and over again, until she believed it; for Marjory had not yet learnt to differentiate her head from her heart. Many women never learn the art, and though some, no doubt, find the difficulty lies in discovering their heads, a far greater number stop short at a calm affection in the catalogue of their emotions. ”

“ Oh, bright, glad day! Oh, careless, foolish talk! Oh, deep abiding sense of peace and good-will in all that sea-girt mountain world which rose around them, havening their little boat! Could it be that there was trouble, or toil, or tears, yonder where the mist floated so tenderly, or there, where cottage and castle, meadow and moor, wheat and tares were blended into one purple glory? There were not many such days in life, so let us cherish the mere memory of them!
The mackerel, it is true, were not to be beguiled, but what matter? ”

“ Cameron insisted on having explained to her word by word. It was a complete exposition, she asserted, of the whole duty of man as viewed by men. To eat, to drink, to amuse themselves, and then to run away.
That same evening, in the mirk end of the gloaming, Marjory, walking in the garden between the great borders of clove pinks which were sending out their fragrance to meet the coming night, heard the feu de joie, arranged by old John Macpherson to greet the laird's arrival, go off like the beginning of a battle. ”

“ But I kept the secret then, Paul, for the sake of your future, as I tell it now for the sake of your future, so that you may believe that I am a friend indeed; for a woman will not stand by and see another woman sacrifice the happiness of a man for whom she once sacrificed her own. That is why I say you must not marry Alice Woodward--you must not, Paul! ”

“ So the Reverend James regretfully gave up his opportunity as lost for the time; but a gleam of manly resolution came to him as he looked first at the hut, then down the road, the pleasant sunshiny road stretching away to where a thin blue smoke from the chimneys of Gleneira Lodge rose above the silver firs and copper beeches to the right of the big house. All that distance to traverse with Marjory, as against Peggy Duncan the pauper, who was bad enough at the best, but, with the rheumatism, simply appalling. ”

“ What is it to any woman unless she stoops to care? Oh! I understand now, Paul--I understand things of which I never even dreamed before; things which have been in your life--things which might have been in mine, perhaps--God knows!--if I had been in your place. But they are no more to me than this--a grief, a regret, because they are a stain upon your past, as all wrong must be. ”

“ Vane set herself deliberately to pierce through the girl's shield of stiff politeness. Not a difficult task with one so quick to respond to the least touch of sympathy; besides, Mrs. Vane in her girlhood had lived in the great world of music, among people who were to Marjory as prophets and kings. So she was soon deep in eager inquiry, and positively felt impatient as, when they were passing old Peggy's cottage, little Paul started up from the brackens with a quick message that his grannie would like to see Miss Marjory, if she could spare time. ”

“ It was evident that, for the time being, he was an optimist, viewing the world as the best of all possible worlds. A glass more, and he would be ready to defend the proposition with his fists; another, and he would have wept over its denial, for Aladdin's genii of the bottle was not more powerful in metamorphosis than Scotch whiskey was on John Macpherson.
"An' here's to you, Gleneira," he said, when Paul returned the glass. "An' it's wissing you as rich as the Duke o' Wellington--Pech! Mistress Cameron, but yon's gude whiskey--water never touched it." ”