"How pretty!" answered Alec, and had no more to say.
"Are the people of Glamerton very wicked, Alec?" asked Kate, making
another attempt to rouse a conversation.
"I'm sure I don't know," answered Alec. "I suppose they're no worse
than other people."
"I thought from Mr Turnbull's sermon that they must be a great deal
worse."
"Oh! they all preach like that--except good Mr Cowie, and he's dead."
"Do you think he knew better than the rest of them?"
"I don't know that. But the missionars do know something that other
people don't know. And that Mr Turnbull always speaks as if he were in
earnest."
"Yes, he does."
"But there's that fellow Bruce!"
"Do you mean the man that put us into his seat?"
"Yes. I _can't_ think what makes my mother so civil to him."
"Why shouldn't she be?"
"Well, you see--I can't bear him. And I can't understand my mother.
It's not like her."
In a moment more they were in a gentle twilight of green, flashed with
streaks of gold. A forest of delicate young larches crowded them in,
their rich brown cones hanging like the knops that looped up their dark
garments fringed with paler green.
And the scent! What a thing to _invent_--the smell of a larch wood! It
is the essence of the earth-odour, distilled in the thousand-fold
alembics of those feathery trees.
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