Yet, ever and ever,
'Would I were dead,' I keep saying, 'that so I could go and
uphold her.'"--pp. 26, 27.
And, meanwhile, Katie, among the others, is dancing and smiling still
on some one who is to her all that Philip had ever been.
When Hewson writes next, his experience has reached its second stage.
He is at Balloch, with the aunt and the cousin of his friend Hope:
and the lady Maria has made his beliefs begin to fail and totter, and
he feels for something to hold firmly. He seems to think, at one
moment, that the mere knowledge of the existence of such an one ought
to compensate for lives of drudgery hemmed in with want; then he
turns round on himself with, "How shall that be?" And, at length, he
appeases his questions, saying that it must and should be so, if it is.
After this, come scraps of letters, crossed and recrossed, from the
Bothie of Toper-na-fuosich. In his travelling towards home, a horse
cast a shoe, and the were directed to David Mackaye. Hewson is still
in the clachan hard by when he urges his friend to come to him: and
he comes.
"There on the blank hill-side, looking down through the loch to
the ocean;
There, with a runnel beside, and pine-trees twain before it,
There, with the road underneath, and in sight of coaches and
steamers,
Dwelling of David Mackaye and his daughters, Elspie and Bella,
Sends up a column of smoke the Bothie of Toper-na-fuosich.
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