period," it would have made no difference to Christina! Why should
it? She had never yet cared for any book beyond the novels of a
certain lady which, to speak with due restraint, do not tend to
profitable thought. At the same time, it was not for the worst in
them that she liked them; she did not understand them well enough to
see it. But there was ground to fear that, when she came to
understand, shocked at first, she would speedily get accustomed to
it, and at length like them all the better for it.

In Mercy's unawakened soul, echoed now and then a faint thrill of
response to some of the things Alister said, and, oftener, to some
of the verses he repeated; and she would look up at him when he was
silent, with an unconscious seeking glance, as if dimly aware of a
beneficent presence. Alister was drawn by the honest gaze of her yet
undeveloped and homely countenance, with its child-look in process
of sublimation, whence the woman would glance out and vanish again,
leaving the child to give disappointing answers. There was something
in it of the look a dog casts up out of his beautiful brown eyes
into the mystery of his master's countenance. She was on the edge of
coming awake; all was darkness about her, but something was pulling
at her! She had never known before that a lady might be lovely in a
ballad as well as in a beautiful gown!

Finding himself so listened to, though the listener was little more
than a child, the heart of the chief began to swell in his great
bosom. Like a child he was pleased. The gray day about him grew
sweet; its very grayness was sweet, and of a silvery sheen. When
they arrived at the burn, and, easily enough from that side, he had
handed them across, he was not quite so glad to turn from them as he
had expected to be.