Chapter 1

THE LOVE-LIGHT.

Long ago, in the days when our caged blackbirds never saw a king's
soldier without whistling impudently, "Come ower the water to
Charlie," a minister of Thrums was to be married, but something
happened, and he remained a bachelor. Then, when he was old, he
passed in our square the lady who was to have been his wife, and
her hair was white, but she, too, was still unmarried. The meeting
had only one witness, a weaver, and he said solemnly afterwards,
"They didna speak, but they just gave one another a look, and I
saw the love-light in their een." No more is remembered of these
two, no being now living ever saw them, but the poetry that was in
the soul of a battered weaver makes them human to us for ever.

It is of another minister I am to tell, but only to those who know
that light when they see it. I am not bidding good-bye to many
readers, for though it is true that some men, of whom Lord Rintoul
was one, live to an old age without knowing love, few of us can
have met them, and of women so incomplete I never heard.

Gavin Dishart was barely twenty-one when he and his mother came to
Thrums, light-hearted like the traveller who knows not what awaits
him at the bend of the road. It was the time of year when the
ground is carpeted beneath the firs with brown needles, when
split-nuts patter all day from the beech, and children lay yellow
corn on the dominie's desk to remind him that now they are needed
in the fields. The day was so silent that carts could be heard
rumbling a mile away. All Thrums was out in its wynds and closes--
a few of the weavers still in knee-breeches--to look at the new
Auld Licht minister. I was there too, the dominie of Glen
Quharity, which is four miles from Thrums; and heavy was my heart
as I stood afar off so that Gavin's mother might not have the pain
of seeing me. I was the only one in the crowd who looked at her
more than at her son.

Eighteen years had passed since we parted. Already her hair had
lost the brightness of its youth, and she seemed to me smaller and
more fragile; and the face that I loved when I was a hobbledehoy,
and loved when I looked once more upon it in Thrums, and always
shall love till I die, was soft and worn. Margaret was an old
woman, and she was only forty-three: and I am the man who made her
old. As Gavin put his eager boyish face out at the carriage
window, many saw that he was holding her hand, but none could be
glad at the sight as the dominie was glad, looking on at a
happiness in which he dared not mingle. Margaret was crying
because she was so proud of her boy. Women do that. Poor sons to
be proud of, good mothers, but I would not have you dry those
tears.

When the