The Conference ended, and the delegates made homeward. The terms had
been agreed to, so far as Scotland was concerned, and all pointed to
peace.
"You didna speak the day, Sinclair, and I fairly thocht you wad hae been
into the fecht," said one delegate to Robert, as the train moved away
from the station.
"No, I wasna feelin' up to the mark," he returned, in a tone that
hinted that he did not want to be troubled, and he sat back in his
corner in silence. In the gray quick gloaming the moors and the hills,
viewed from the train, seemed to him a country without hope. There was
sadness in it, and pain, and the gray wintry sky brooded of sorrows to
come.
Occasionally a few sheep would start away from where they had been
grazing close to the railway, startled by the noise of the train. Thin
wisps of gray ragged clouds hung low, as if softly descending upon the
hills, in fateful sinister storms, and a fiery flash of yellow left a
strip of anger on the western horizon, where the sun had gone down a
short time ago.
Gray mists and grayer moors, with occasionally a solitary tree standing
out in the distance, as if to accentuate the loneliness and the sorrow
of the world in their ragged branches, which seemed ready to pierce the
sky in defiance of the anger of the, as yet, unleashed storm.
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