This Robert could not yet think, and had to grow able to think it
by being himself made an instrument of God's music.
What he could think was that the glorious mystery of his bonny leddy
was gone for ever--and alas! she had no soul. Here was an eternal
sorrow. He could never meet her again. His affections, which must
live for ever, were set upon that which had passed away. But the
child that weeps because his mutilated doll will not rise from the
dead, shall yet find relief from his sorrow, a true relief, both
human and divine. He shall know that that which in the doll made
him love the doll, has not passed away. And Robert must yet be
comforted for the loss of his bonny leddy. If she had had a soul,
nothing but her own self could ever satisfy him. As she had no
soul, another body might take her place, nor occasion reproach of
inconstancy.
But, in the meantime, the shears of Fate having cut the string of
the sky-soaring kite of his imagination, had left him with the stick
in his hand. And thus the rest of that winter was dreary enough.
The glow was out of his heart; the glow was out of the world. The
bleak, kindless wind was hissing through those pines that clothed
the hill above Bodyfauld, and over the dead garden, where in the
summer time the rose had looked down so lovingly on the heartsease.
If he had stood once more at gloaming in that barley-stubble, not
even the wail of Flodden-field would have found him there, but a
keen sense of personal misery and hopeless cold.
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