of the furniture.  It was his first sight of Margaret.  Some of the neighbours were expected to dinner, and her aid was in requisition to get the grand room of the house prepared for the occasion.  He supposed her to belong to the household, till, one day, feeling compelled to go out for a stroll, he caught sight of her so occupied at the door of her father’s cottage, that he perceived at once that must be her home:  she was, in fact, seated upon a stool, paring potatoes.  She saw him as well, and, apparently ashamed at the recollection of having been discovered idling in the drawing-room, rose and went in.  He had met David once or twice about the house, and, attracted by his appearance, had had some conversation with him; but he did not know where he lived, nor that he was the father of the girl whom he had seen.

CHAPTER III.

The Daisy and the primrose.

Dear secret Greenness, nursed below
  Tempests and winds and winter nights! 
Vex not that but one sees thee grow;
  That One made all these lesser lights.

Henry Vaughan.

It was, of course, quite by accident that Sutherland had met Margaret in the fir-wood.  The wind had changed during the night, and swept all the clouds from the face of the sky; and when he looked out in the morning, he saw the fir-tops waving in the sunlight, and heard the sound of a south-west wind sweeping through them with the tune of running waters in its course.  It is a well-practised ear that can tell whether the sound it hears be that of gently falling waters, or of wind flowing through the branches of firs.  Sutherland’s heart, reviving like a dormouse in its hole, began to be joyful at the sight of the genial motions of Nature, telling of warmth and blessedness at hand.  Some goal of life, vague but sure, seemed to glimmer through the appearances around him, and to stimulate him to action.  Be dressed in haste, and went out to meet the Spring.  He wandered into the heart of the wood.  The sunlight shone like a sunset upon the red trunks and boughs of the old fir-trees, but like the first sunrise of the world upon the new green fringes that edged the young shoots of the larches.  High up, hung the memorials of past summers in the rich brown tassels of the clustering cones; while the ground under foot was dappled with sunshine on the fallen fir-needles, and the great fallen cones which had opened to scatter their autumnal seed, and now lay waiting for decay.  Overhead, the tops whence they had fallen, waved in the wind, as in welcome of the Spring, with that peculiar swinging motion which made the poets of the sixteenth century call them “sailing pines.”  The wind blew cool, but not cold; and was filled with a delicious odour from the earth, which Sutherland took as a sign that she was coming alive at last.  And the Spring he went out to meet, met him.  For, first, at