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She had seated herself on a grassy bank under the shade of the trees which skirted one side of the park of Bellendean. Instinctively she had chosen a spot where there was ‘a view.’ How many such spots are there to which preoccupied people, with something to think out, resort half unawares, and all-unconscious of the landscape spread before them! Edinburgh, gray in the distance, with her crags and towers, shone through the opening carefully cut in the trees, the angle of the castled rock standing forth boldly against the dimness of the smoke behind; and the air was so clear, and the atmosphere so still, that while Mrs. Hayward sat there the sound of the gun which regulates the time for all Edinburgh—the gun fired from the Castle at one o’clock—boomed through the distance with a sudden shock which made her start. She was not a fanciful woman, nor given to metaphors. But there was something in the peace of the landscape, the summer quiet, broken only by the hum of insects and rustle of the waving boughs, the distant town too far off to add a note to that soft breathing of nature, which made a centre to the picture and no more—when the air was suddenly rent by the harsh and fatal sound of the gun, making the spectator start—which was to her like an emblematic representation of what had happened to herself. To be sure, if she had but thought of it, that voice of war had been tamed into a service of domestic peace, a sound as innocent as chanticleer; but Mrs. Hayward was a stranger, and was unaware of this. As she rose up hurriedly, startled by the shock in the air, she saw her husband coming towards her across the sunshine. He was moving like a man in a dream, moving instinctively towards where she was, but otherwise unconscious where he was going, unaware of the little heights and hollows, stumbling over the stump of a tree that came in his way. The sight of his abstraction brought her back to herself. He came up to her, and held out the little packet in his hand.