hat she sought
except the general desire to know the worst of the dreadful report, she
hurried forward to the very spot which of all others her feelings of the
preceding day would have induced her to avoid.

Who would, upon the evening of Shrovetide, have persuaded the proud, the
timid, the shy, the rigidly decorous Catharine Glover that before mass
on Ash Wednesday she should rush through the streets of Perth, making
her way amidst tumult and confusion, with her hair unbound and her dress
disarranged, to seek the house of that same lover who, she had reason to
believe, had so grossly and indelicately neglected and affronted her as
to pursue a low and licentious amour? Yet so it was; and her eagerness
taking, as if by instinct, the road which was most free, she avoided the
High Street, where the pressure was greatest, and reached the wynd by
the narrow lanes on the northern skirt of the town, through which Henry
Smith had formerly escorted Louise. But even these comparatively lonely
passages were now astir with passengers, so general was the alarm.
Catharine Glover made her way through them, however, while such as
observed her looked on each other and shook their heads in sympathy with
her distress. At length, without any distinct idea of her own purpose,
she stood before her lover's door and knocked for admittance.

The silence which succeeded the echoing of her hasty summons increased
the alarm which had induced her to take this desperate measure.

"Open--open, Henry!" she cried. "Open, if you yet live! Open, if you
would not find Catharine Glover dead upon your threshold!"

As she cried thus frantically to ears which she was taught to believe
were stopped by death, the lover she invoked opened the door in person,
just in time to prevent her sinking on the ground. The extremity of his
ecstatic joy upon an occasion so unexpected was qualified only by the
wonder which forbade him to believe it real, and by his alarm at the
closed eyes, half opened and blanched lips, total absence of complexion,
and apparently total cessation of breathing.

Henry had remained at home, in spite of the general alarm, which had
reached his ears for a considerable time, fully determined to put
himself in the way of no brawls that he could avoid; and it was only in
compliance with a summons from the magistrates, which, as a burgher, he
was bound to obey, that, taking his sword and a spare buckler from the
wall, he was about to go forth, f