mixed in their views of
right-doing.

He is staying now at the great house of the neighbourhood, while his new
manse is being put in order. Roderick, the piper, he says, has a grand
collection of pipe tunes given him by an officer of the Black Watch.
Francesca, when she and Ronald visit the Castle on their wedding
journey, is to have 'Johnnie Cope' to wake her in the morning, 'Brose
and Butter' just before dinner is served, a reel, a strathspey, and
a march while the meal is going on, and, last of all, the 'Highland
Wedding.' Ronald does not know whether there are any Lowland Scots
or English words to this pipe tune, but it is always played in the
Highlands after the actual marriage, and the words in Gaelic are, 'Alas
for me if the wife I have married is not a good one, for she will eat
the food and not do the work!'

"You don't think Ronald meant anything personal in quoting that?" I
asked Francesca teasingly; but she shot me such a reproachful look that
I hadn't the heart to persist, her face was so full of self-distrust and
love and longing.

What creatures of sense we are, after all; and in certain moods, of what
avail is it if the beloved object is alive, safe, loyal, so long as
he is absent? He may write letters like Horace Walpole or
Chesterfield--better still, like Alfred de Musset, or George Sand, or
the Brownings; but one clasp of the hand that moved the pen is worth an
ocean of words! You believe only in the etherealised, the spiritualised
passion of love; you know that it can exist through years of separation,
can live and grow where a coarser feeling would die for lack of
nourishment; still though your spirit should be strong enough to meet
its spirit mate somewhere in the realms of imagination, and the bodily
presence ought not really to be necessary, your stubborn heart of flesh
craves sight and sound and touch. That is the only pitiless part
of death, it seems to me. We have had the friendship, the love, the
sympathy, and these are things that can never die; they have made us
what we are, and they are by their very nature immortal; yet we would
come near to bartering all these spiritual possessions for the 'touch of
a vanished hand, and the sound of a voice that is still.'

How could I ever think life easy enough to be ventured on alone! It
is so beautiful to feel oneself of infinite value to one other human
creature; to hear beside one's own step the tread of a chosen companion
on the same road. A