There was no sight in Wythburn more touching than to see this girl solacing her father’s declining years, meeting his wishes with anticipatory devices, pampering him in his whims, soothing him in the imaginary sorrows sometimes incident to age, even indulging him with a sort of pathetic humor in his frequent hallucinations.  To do this she had to put by a good many felicities dear to her age and condition, but there was no apparent consciousness of self-sacrifice.  She had many lovers, for in these early years she was beautiful; and she had yet more suitors, for she was accounted rich.  But neither flattery nor the fervor of genuine passion seemed to touch her, and those who sought her under the transparent guise of seeking her father usually went away as they came.  She had a smile and the cheeriest word of welcome for all alike, and so the young dalesmen who wooed her from the ignoble motive came to think her a little of a coquette, while those who wooed her from the purer impulse despaired of ruffling with the gentlest gales of love the still atmosphere of her heart.

One day suddenly, however, the old statesman died, and his fiddle was heard no more across the valley in the quiet of the evening, but was left untouched for the dust to gather on it where he himself had hung it on the nail in the kitchen under his hat.  Then when life seemed to the forlorn girl a wide blank, a world without a sun in it, Angus Ray went over for the first time as a suitor to the cottage under Castenand, and put his hand in hers and looked calmly into her eyes.  He told her that a girl could not live long an unfriended life like hers—­that she should not if she could; she could not if she would—­would she not come to him?

It was the force of the magnet to the steel.  With swimming eyes she looked up into his strong face, tender now with a tremor never before seen there; and as he drew her gently towards him her glistening tears fell hot and fast over her brightening and now radiant face, and, as though to hide them from him, she laid her head on his breast.  This was all the wooing of Angus Ray.

They had two sons, and of these the younger more nearly resembled his mother.  Willy Ray had not merely his mother’s features; he had her disposition also.  He had the rounded neck and lissom limbs of a woman; he had a woman’s complexion, and the light of a woman’s look in his soft blue eyes.  When the years gave a thin curly beard to his cheek they took nothing from its delicate comeliness.  It was as if nature had down to the last moment meant Willy for a girl.  He had been an apt scholar at school, and was one of the few persons in Wythburn having claims to education.  Willy’s elder brother, Ralph, more nearly resembled his father.  He had his father’s stature and strength of limb, but some of his mother’s qualities had also been inherited by him.  In manner he was neither so austere and taciturn as his father, nor so gentle and amiable as his mother.  He was by no means a scholar, and only the strong hand of his father had kept him as a boy in fear of the penalties incurred by the truant.  Courage and resolution were his distinguishing characteristics.