Poor little Phemy was in bed, and had cried herself asleep. Kirsty was more tired than she had ever been before. She went to bed at once, but, for a long time, not to sleep.

 

She had no doubt her parents approved of the chastisement¹ she had given Gordon, and she herself nowise repented² of it; yet the instant she lay down, back came the same sudden something that set her weeping on the hillside. As then, all un-sent for, the face of Francie Gordon, such as he was in their childhood, rose before her, but marred³ by her hand with stripes of disgrace from his father’s whip; and with the vision came again the torrent⁴ of her tears, for, if his father had then struck him so, she would have been bold in his defence. She pressed her face into the pillow lest her sobs⁵ should be heard. She was by no means a young woman ready to weep, but the thought of the boy-face with her blows upon it, got within her guard, and ran her through the heart. It seemed as if nevermore would she escape the imagined sight. It is a sore thing when a woman, born a protector, has for protection to become an avenger⁶, and severe was the revulsion in Kirsty from an act of violence foreign to the whole habit, though nowise inconsistent with the character, of the calm, thoughtful woman. She had never struck even the one-horned cow that would, for very cursedness, kick over the milk-pail! Hers was the wrath⁷ of the mother, whose very presence in a calm soul is its justification—for how could it be there but by the original energy? The wrath was gone, and the mother soul turned against itself—not in judgment⁸ at all, but in irrepressible feeling. She did not for one moment think, I repeat, that she ought not to have done it, and she was glad in her heart to know that what he had said and she had done must keep Phemy and him apart; but there was the blow on the face of the boy she had loved, and there was the reflex wound in her own soul! Surely she loved him yet with her mother-love, else how could she have been angry enough with him to strike him! For weeks the pain lasted keen, and it was ever after ready to return. It was a human type of the divine suffering in the discipline of the sinner, which with some of the old prophets takes the shape of God’s

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