Publisher's Synopsis
Long ago, in the days when our caged blackbirds never saw a king's soldier withoutwhistling impudently, "Come ower the water to Charlie," a minister of Thrums was to bemarried, but something happened, and he remained a bachelor. Then, when he was old, hepassed in our square the lady who was to have been his wife, and her hair was white, butshe, too, was still unmarried. The meeting had only one witness, a weaver, and he saidsolemnly afterwards, "They didna speak, but they just gave one another a look, and I sawthe love-light in their een." No more is remembered of these two, no being now living eversaw them, but the poetry that was in the soul of a battered weaver makes them human tous for ever.It is of another minister I am to tell, but only to those who know that light when they see it.I am not bidding good-bye to many readers, for though it is true that some men, of whomLord Rintoul was one, live to an old age without knowing love, few of us can have met them, and of women so incomplete I never heard
