When the dawn of another day rose over Shoulthwaite, a great silence had fallen on the old house on the moss.  The man who had made it what it was—­the man who had been its vital spirit—­slept his last deep sleep in the bedroom known as the kitchen loft.  Throughout forty years his had been the voice first heard in that mountain home when the earliest gleams of morning struggled through the deep recesses of the low mullioned windows.  Perhaps on the day following market day he sometimes lay an hour longer; but his stern rule of life spared none, and himself least of all.  If at sixty his powerful limbs were less supple than of old, if his Jove-like head with its flowing beard had become tipped with the hoar frost, he had relaxed nothing of his rigid self-government on that account.  When the clock in the kitchen had struck ten at night, Angus had risen up, whatever his occupation, whatever his company, and retired to rest.  And the day had hardly dawned when he was astir in the morning, rousing first the men and next the women of his household.  Every one had waited for his call.  There had been no sound more familiar than that of his firm footstep, followed by the occasional creak of the old timbers, breaking the early stillness.  That footstep would be heard no more.

Dame Ray sat in a chair before the kitchen fire.  She had sat there the whole night through, moaning sometimes, but speaking hardly at all.  Sleep had not come near her, yet she scarcely seemed to be awake.  Last night’s shock had more than half shattered her senses, but it had flashed upon her mind a vision of her whole life.  Only half conscious of what was going on about her, she saw vividly as in a glass the incidents of those bygone years, that had lain so long unremembered.  The little cottage under Castenand; her old father playing his fiddle in the quiet of a summer evening; herself, a fresh young maiden, busied about him with a hundred tender cares; then a great sorrow and a dead waste of silence,—­all this appeared to belong to some earlier existence.  And then the sun had seemed to rise on a fuller life that came later.  A holy change had come over her, and to her transfigured feeling the world looked different.  But that bright sun had set now, and all around was gloom.  Slowly she swayed herself to and fro hour after hour in her chair, as one by one these memories came back to her—­came, and went, and came again.

On Rotha the care of the household had fallen.  The young girl had sat long by the old dame overnight, holding her hand and speaking softly to her between the outbursts of her own grief.  She had whispered something about brave sons who would yet be her great stay, and then the comforter herself had needed comfort and her voice of solace had been stilled.  When the daylight came in at the covered windows, Rotha rose up unrefreshed; but with a resolute heart she set herself to the duties that had dropped so unexpectedly upon her.  She put the spinning-wheel into the neuk window-stand and the woo-wheel against the wall.  They would not be wanted now.  She cleared the sconce and took down the flitches that hung from the rannel-tree to dry.  Then she cooked the early breakfast of oatmeal porridge, and took the milk that the boy brought from the cow shed and put it into the dishes that she had placed on the long oak table which stretched across the kitchen.