The Lilac Sunbonnet | Page 2

manage it myself," he said, "I could
not think of letting you put your hand to it."
"I am not a fine lady," said the girl, with a little impatient movement of
her brows, as if she had stamped her foot. "I am nothing but a cottar's
lassie."
"But then, how comes it that you speak as you do?" asked Ralph.
"I have been long in England--as a lady's maid," she answered with a
strange, disquieting look at him. She had taken one side of the bag of

books in spite of his protest, and now walked by Ralph's side through
the evening coolness.
"This is the first time you have been hereaway?" his companion asked.
Ralph nodded a quick affirmative and smiled.
"Then," said Jess Kissock, the rich blood mantling her dark cheeks, "I
am the first from the Dullarg you have spoken to!"
"The very first!" said Ralph.
"Then I am glad," said Jess Kissock. But in the young man's heart there
was no answering gladness, though in very sooth she was an exceeding
handsome maid.
CHAPTER I.
THE BLANKET-WASHING.
Ralph Peden lay well content under a thorn bush above the Grannoch
water. It was the second day of his sojourning in Galloway--the first of
his breathing the heather scent on which the bees grew tipsy, and of
listening to the grasshoppers CHIRRING in the long bent by the loch
side. Yesterday his father's friend, Allan Welsh, minister of the Marrow
kirk in the parish of Dullarg, had held high discourse with him as to his
soul's health, and made many inquiries as to how it sped in the great
city with the precarious handful of pious folk, who gathered to listen to
the precious and savoury truths of the pure Marrow teaching. Ralph
Peden was charged with many messages from his father, the
metropolitan Marrow minister, to Allan Welsh--dear to his soul as the
only minister who had upheld the essentials on that great day, when
among the assembled Presbyters so many had gone backward and
walked no more with him.
"Be faithful with the young man, my son," Allan Welsh read in the
quaintly sealed and delicately written letter which his brother minister
in Edinburgh had sent to him, and which Ralph had duly delivered in

the square, grim manse of Dullarg, with a sedate and old-fashioned
reverence which sat strangely on one of his years. "Be faithful with the
young man," continued the letter; "he is well grounded on the
fundamentals; his head is filled with godly lear, and he has sound views
on the Headship; but he has always been a little cold and distant even to
me, his father according to the flesh. With his companions he is apt to
be distant and reserved. I am to blame for the solitude of our life here in
James's Court, but to you I do not need to tell the reason of that. The
Lord give you his guidance in leading the young man in the right way."
So far Gilbert Peden's letter had run staidly and in character like the
spoken words of the writer. But here it broke off. The writing, hitherto
fine as a hair, thickened; and from this point became crowded and
difficult, as though the floods of feeling had broken some dam. "O man
Allan, for my sake, if at all you have loved me, or owe me anything,
dig deep and see if the lad has a heart. He shews it not to me."
So that is why Ralph Peden lies couched in the sparce bells of the ling,
just where the dry, twisted timothy grasses are beginning to overcrown
the purple bells of the heather. Tall and clean-limbed, with a student's
pallor of clear-cut face, a slightly ascetic stoop, dark brown curls
clustering over a white forehead, and eyes which looked steadfast and
true, the young man was sufficient of a hero. He wore a broad straw hat,
which he had a pleasant habit of pushing back, so that his clustering
locks fell over his brow after a fashion which all women thought
becoming. But Ralph Peden heeded not what women thought, said, or
did, for he was trysted to the kirk of the Marrow, the sole repertory of
orthodox truth in Scotland, which is as good as saying in the wide
world--perhaps even in the universe.
Ralph Peden had dwelt all his life with his father in an old house in
James's Court, Edinburgh, overlooking the great bounding circle of the
northern horizon and the eastern sea. He had been trained by his father
to think more of a professor's opinion on his Hebrew exercise than of a
woman's opinion on any subject whatever. He had been told that
women were an indispensable part of the economy of creation;