Wondering how far it would have moved before the sermon
was over, and whether it would have shone so very bright if God had
made no covenant with Abraham, she was earnestly watching it pass from
spot to spot, and from cobweb to cobweb, as if already it fled before
the coming darkness of the long winter night, when she caught a glimpse
of a very peculiar countenance turned in the same direction--that is,
not towards the minister, but towards this travelling light. She
thought the woman was watching it as well as she, and wondered whether
she too was hoping for a plate of hot broth as soon as the sunbeam had
gone a certain distance--broth being the Sunday fare with the
Bruces--and, I presume, with most families in Scotland. The countenance
was very plain, seamed and scarred as if the woman had fallen into the
fire when a child; and Annie had not looked at her two seconds, before
she saw that she was perfectly blind. Indeed she thought at first that
she had no eyes at all; but as she kept gazing, fascinated with the
strangeness and ugliness of the face, she discovered that the eyelids,
though incapable of separating, were inconstant motion, and that a
shrunken eye-ball underneath each kept rolling and turning ever, as if
searching for something it could not find.
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