Talk is the
last link, the last relation. But with the end of the conversation,
when the voice stops and the bright face of the listener is turned away,
solitude falls again on the bruised heart. Kirstie had lost her "cannie
hour at e'en"; she could no more wander with Archie, a ghost if you
will, but a happy ghost, in fields Elysian. And to her it was as if the
whole world had fallen silent; to him, but an unremarkable change of
amusements. And she raged to know it. The effervescency of her
passionate and irritable nature rose within her at times to bursting
point.
This is the price paid by age for unseasonable ardours of feeling. It
must have been so for Kirstie at any time when the occasion chanced; but
it so fell out that she was deprived of this delight in the hour when
she had most need of it, when she had most to say, most to ask, and when
she trembled to recognise her sovereignty not merely in abeyance but
annulled. For, with the clairvoyance of a genuine love, she had pierced
the mystery that had so long embarrassed Frank.
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