Men drawing near to an end of life's adventurous journey--maids thrilling with fear and curiosity on the threshold of entrance--women who had borne and perhaps buried children, who could remember the clinging of the small dead hands and the patter of the little feet now silent--he marvelled that among all those faces there should be no face of expectation, none that was mobile, none into which the rhythm and poetry of life had entered.

"O for a live face," he thought; and at times he had a memory of Lady Flora; and at times he would study the living gallery before him with despair, and would see himself go on to waste his days in that joyless pastoral place, and death come to him, and his grave be dug under the rowans, and the Spirit of the Earth laugh out in a thunder-peal at the huge fiasco.
On this particular Sunday, there was no doubt but that the spring had come at last.

It was warm, with a latent shiver in the air that made the warmth only the more welcome.

The shallows of the stream glittered and tinkled among bunches of primrose.

Vagrant scents of the earth arrested Archie by the way with moments of ethereal intoxication.