A Daughter of Heth by William Black

COQUETTE'S SONG.

For a long period Coquette's life at Airlie was so uneventful that it may be dismissed with the briefest notice. It seemed to her that she had passed through that season of youth and springtime when romance and love and anticipation ought to colour for a brief while the atmosphere round a human existence as if with rainbows. That was all over -- if, indeed, it had ever occurred to her. There was now but a sad, grey monotony; a going by of the weeks and months in this remote moorland place, where the people seemed hard, unimpressionable, unfriendly. She began to acquire notions of duty. She began to devise charitable occupations for herself. She even began various studies which could never by any chance be of use to her. And she grew almost to love the slow, melancholy droning by the old Scotch folk of those desolating passages in the Prophets which told of woe and wrath and the swift end of things, or which, still more appropriately, dealt with the vanity of life, and the shortness of man's days.