ld be awake now. Ah yes! there was
light in the wool-carder's window. His wife was dying. That light over
the dying, wiped the death-look from the face of the sleeping town,
Annie roused herself and passed on, fearing to be seen. It was the only
thing to be afraid of. But the stillness was awful. One silence only
could be more awful: the same silence at noon-day.

So she passed into the western road and through the trees to the bridge
over the Wan Water. They stood so still in the moonlight! And the smell
from the withering fields laid bare of the harvest and breathing out
their damp odours, came to her mixed with the chill air from the dark
hills around, already spiced with keen atoms of frost, soon to appear
in spangly spikes. Beneath the bridge the river flowed maunderingly,
blundering out unintelligible news of its parent bog and all the dreary
places it had come through on its way to the strath of Glamerton, which
nobody listened to but one glad-hearted, puzzle-brained girl, who stood
looking down into it from the bridge when she ought to have been in bed
and asleep. She was not far from Clippenstrae, but she could not go
there so early, for her aunt would be frightened first and angry next.
So she wandered up the stream to the old church-forsaken churchyard,
and sat on one of the tombstones. It became very cold as the morning
drew on. The moon went down; the stars grew dim; the river ran with a
livelier murmur; and through all the fine gradations of dawn--cloudy
wind and grey sky--the gates of orange and red burst open, and the sun
came forth rejoicing. The long night was over. It had not been a very
weary one; for Annie had thoughts of her own, and like the earth in the
warm summer nights, could shine and flash up through the dark, seeking
the face of God in the altar-flame of prayer. Yet she was glad when the
sun came. With the first bubble of the spring of light bursting out on
the hill-top, she rose and walked through the long shadows of the
graves down to the river and through the long shadows of the stubble
down the side of the river, which shone in the morning light like a
flowing crystal of delicate brown--and so to Clippenstrae, where she
found her aunt still in her night-cap. She was standing at the door,
however, shading her eyes with her hand, looking abroad as if for some
one that might be crossing hitherward from the east. She did not see
Annie approaching from the north.

"What are ye luikin' for,