CHAPTER XXVIII.

Another day, as bright, as weary, and as long, and still there were no tidings of Christian. Anne became alarmed. She sent out Jacky to make inquiries; Jacky ascertained that Miss Lillie on the previous morning had gone by the earliest coach to Edinburgh. The intelligence was some relief, yet perplexed Anne painfully; the arrangements were going on, but what could she do, if Christian remained absent, thus left alone with the dead?

In the middle of the day, Miss Crankie brought her a letter from Mrs. Catherine. Anne's conscience smote her; during Patrick's illness, she had scarcely written to Mrs. Catherine at all; and her brief notes had only intimated his illness, and her hope of obtaining some further information through the Lillies. Mrs. Catherine's letter had an enclosure.

"My Gowan,

"What has come over you? I have been marvelling these past mornings whether it was success or failure--a light heart or a downcast one, that made you forgetful of folk to whom all your doings are matters of interest, and have been since you could use your own proper tongue to testify of them. Think you this lad Lillie has any further knowledge than you have yourself? I count it unlikely, or else he is a pithless laggard, not worthy to call Norman Rutherford friend, and Norman was not one to choose his friends lightly, or be joined in near amity with a shallow head and a faint heart. So I would have you build little on the hope of getting good tidings from him, seeing that if he had known anything, he must have put it to its fitting use before now. You say it gave him a fever? I like not folk, child, who are thrown into fevers by sore trouble and anguish, and make themselves a burden and a cumbrance, when they ought to be quickened to keener life--the more helpful and strong, the greater the extremity; it augurs a narrow vessel and a frail spirit in most cases--it may be other in his. Certain he bore himself like a man in the night you tell me of. Let me see his sister, if you can bring her; there, seems--if ye draw like the life--to be no soil in her for the cowardice of sickness to flourish on, from which I take my certainty, that if she had kent any good word concerning this dark mystery, she must have put it to the proof before now.

"To speak about other matters, I send you a letter--worthy the light-headed, undutiful fuil from whose vain hand it comes. You will see she will have none of my counsel, and puts my offer of an honorable roof over her, and a home dependent on no caprice or strange woman's pleasure, in the light of a good meaning--will to do kindness without power. If it were not for Archie's sake, and for the good-fame of their broken house, she should never more say light word to me. He has been but a month dead, this miserable man of hers--that she left her mother's sick-bed for--and look at her words! without so much as a decent shadow on them, to tell where the sore gloom of death had fallen so late. I am growing testy in my spirit, child; though truly sorrow would set me better than anger, to look upon the like of a born fuil like this--her brother ruined, and her man killed. Archie, a laboring wayfarer, with his good name tarnished, and his father's inheritance, lost; the husband for whose sake she brought down her mother's gray hairs with sorrow to the grave, taken away suddenly from this world by the red grip of a violent death, and the wanton fuil what can I call her else?--as if she had not gotten enough to sober her for a while, returning in haste to her vanities--feared to leave the atmosphere of them--singing songs over the man's new grave, and giving long nights to strangers, when she can but spare a brief minute to say a kind word to her one brother--a kind word, said I! I should say a bitter one, of folly and selfishness,--not comfort to him in his labor, but records of her own sinful vanities.

"You will say I am bitter, child, at this fuil--so I am--the more that I cannot be done with her, as I could with any other of her kind. She is still the bairn of Isabel Balfour--in good or in evil I am trysted to keep my eye upon her. I have been asking about the household she is in. The mistress of it, her friend, is at least of pure name; a scheming woman as I hear from one of their own vain kind--who has a pride in yoking the fuils about her in the unstable bands of marriage. Isabel has her mother's fair face; they will be wedding her again for some passing fancy, or for dirt of siller. I scarce know which is the worst. I will have no hand in it, however it happens. Since she will be left to herself, she must. If deadly peril ever comes, I must put forth the strong hand.

"You will come to me with all speed when you can win. If you have any glimpse of good tidings, or if you have none--I am meaning when you come to any certainty--let me know without delay, that I may make ready for our home-going. To say the truth, I am weary at my heart of this place, and sickened with anger at the fuil whose