low, moved voices in which they passed made them
sacred in the memory. In the falling greyness of the evening he watched
her figure winding through the morass, saw it turn a last time and wave
a hand, and then pass through the Slap; and it seemed to him as if
something went along with her out of the deepest of his heart. And
something surely had come, and come to dwell there. He had retained from
childhood a picture, now half obliterated by the passage of time and the
multitude of fresh impressions, of his mother telling him, with the
fluttered earnestness of her voice, and often with dropping tears, the
tale of the "Praying Weaver," on the very scene of his brief tragedy and
long repose. And now there was a companion piece; and he beheld, and he
should behold for ever, Christina perched on the same tomb, in the grey
colours of the evening, gracious, dainty, perfect as a flower, and she
also singing--

"Of old, unhappy far off things,
And battles long ago,"

of their common ancestors now dead, of their rude wars composed, their
weapons buried with them, and of these strange changelings, their
descendants, who lingered a little in their places, and would soon be
gone also, and perhaps sung of by others at the gloaming hour. By one of
the unconscious arts of tenderness the two women were enshrined together
in his memory. Tears, in that hour of sensibility, came into his eyes
indifferently at the thought of either; and the girl, from being
something merely bright and shapely, was caught up into the zone of
things serious as life and death and his dead mother. So that in all
ways and on either side, Fate played his game artfully with this poor
pair of children. The generations were prepared, the pangs were made
ready, before the curtain rose on the dark drama.

In the same moment of time that she disappeared from Archie, there
opened before Kirstie's eyes the cup-like hollow in which the farm lay.
She saw, some five hundred feet below her, the house making itself
bright with candles, and this was a broad hint to her to hurry. For they
were only kindled on a Sabbath night with a view to that family worship
which rounded in the incomparable tedium of the day and brought on the
relaxation of supper. Already she knew that Robert must be withinsides
at the head of the table, "waling the portions"; for it was Robert in
his quality of family priest and judge, not the gifted Gilbert, who
officiated. She made good time accor