The White People

they did happen. I am in secret deeply and strangely glad. I have heard other people say things-and they were not always sad people, either-which made me feel

es and give thanks. That was what I felt myself before I found out so strangely, and I was only a girl. That is why I intend to write

was, of course, largely because Muircarrie Castle was in such a wild and remote part of Scotland that when my few relations felt they must pay me a visit as a mere matter of duty, their journey from London, or their pleasant places in the south of England, seemed to them like a pilgrimage to a sort of

and I was, so to speak, the chieftainess of the clan. But I was a plain, undersized little child, and had no attraction for any one but Jean Braidfute, a distant cousin, who took care of me, and Angus Macayre, who took care of the libr

he castle, and was used to its hugeness, of which I only knew corners. Until I was seven years old, I think, I imagined all but very poor people lived in castles and were saluted by

ion to believe that The Muircarrie must be piped proudly to; and his ancestors had been pipers to the head of the clan for five generations. It was his duty to march round the dining-hall and play while the guests feasted, but I was obliged in the end to make him believe that he c

to any one, and I did not know that this was unusual. One of my early memories is that I heard an under-nursemaid say to another this curious thing: "Both her father and

hey were quite alone, and spent their days fishing or riding or wandering on the moor together, or reading by the fire in the library the ancient books Angus Macayre found for them. The library was a marvelous place, and Macayre knew every volume in it. They used to sit and read like children am

understood, in a way of my own, what happened to my mother one brilliant late October afternoon when my father was brought home dead-followed by the guests who had gone out shooting with him. His foot had caug

ugh the heather, following a burden carried on a stretcher of fir boughs. Some of her women guests were with her, and one of them said afterward that when she first caught sight of the moving figures she got up slowly and crept to the stone balustrade w

ve-taken off-their bonnets," and fell

d not open her eyes or make a sound; she lay white and cold. The celebrated physicians who came from London talked of catalepsy and afterward wro

after I grew up. Jean had been my father's nursery governess

y first laid her down," she said. "And my eyes were so near her every moment that I

ause I saw a change stealing over her. It was not color-it was not even a shadow of a motion. It was something else. If I had spoken what I felt, they would have said I was light-headed with

f sound had drawn nearer, and it had become something else-something she saw-something which saw her. First her young marble face had p

it. But soon he had begun to call to her that was like his own heart to him. And she had heard. And then, being half away from earth herself, she had seen him and known h

t was like a thing alive-a huge giant lying spread out in the sun warming itself, or covering itself with thick, white mist which sometimes writhed and twisted itself into wraiths. First I noticed a

er and whiter, and it began to hide the heather and the gorse and broom, and then the low young fir-trees. It mounted and mounted, and sometimes a breath of wind twisted it into weird shapes, almost like human creatures. It opened and closed again, and then it dragged and crept and grew thicker. A

med desolate to me. From my first memory of it I had a vague, half-comforted feeling that there was some strange li

ttle child who had lived a life quite apart from the rest of the world. I was too silent by nature to talk and ask questions, even if I had had others to talk to. I had only Jean and Angus, and