since then have we sat or stood together there,
granny and I, watching the sun's good-night. I think she must have begun
to teach me to look at it while I was still almost a baby. For these
wonderful sunsets seem mixed up in my mind with the very first things I
can remember. And still more with the most solemn and beautiful thoughts
I have ever had. I always fancied when I was _very_ tiny that if only we
could have pushed away the long low stretch of hills which prevented
our seeing the very last of the dear sun, we should have had an actual
peep into heaven, or at least that we should have seen the golden gates
leading there. And I never watched the sun set without sending a message
by him to papa and mamma. Only in my own mind, of course. I never told
grandmamma about it for years and years. But I did feel sure he went
there every night and that the beautiful colours had to do with that
somehow.

Grandmamma felt as if the lovely glow in the sky was a sort of good omen
for our life at Windy Gap, and she felt happier on her journey back in
the railway that evening than she had done since papa and mamma died.

She told Kezia and me all about it--you will be amused at my saying she
told _me_, for of course I was only a baby and couldn't understand. But
she used to fancy I _did_ understand a little, and she got into the way
of talking to me when we were alone together especially, almost as if
she was thinking aloud. I cannot remember the time when she didn't talk
to me 'sensibly,' and perhaps that made me a little old for my age.
Granny says I used to grow quite grave when she talked seriously, and
that I would laugh and crow with pleasure when she seemed bright and
happy. And this made her try more than anything else to _be_ bright and
happy.

Dear, dear grandmamma--how very, exceedingly unselfish she was! For I
now see what a really sad life most people would have thought hers. All
her dearest ones gone; her husband, her son and her son's wife--mamma, I
mean--whom she had loved nearly, if not quite as much, as if she had
been her own daughter; and she left behind when she was getting old, to
take care of one tiny little baby girl--and to be so poor, too. I don't
think even now I quite understand her goodness, but every day I am
getting to see it more and more, even though at one time I was both
ungrateful and very silly, as you will hear before you come to the end
of this little history.

And now that I have explaine