reak of the old timbers, breaking the
early stillness. That footstep would be heard no more.

Dame Ray sat in a chair before the kitchen fire. She had sat there the
whole night through, moaning sometimes, but speaking hardly at all.
Sleep had not come near her, yet she scarcely seemed to be awake. Last
night's shock had more than half shattered her senses, but it had
flashed upon her mind a vision of her whole life. Only half conscious
of what was going on about her, she saw vividly as in a glass the
incidents of those bygone years, that had lain so long unremembered.
The little cottage under Castenand; her old father playing his fiddle
in the quiet of a summer evening; herself, a fresh young maiden,
busied about him with a hundred tender cares; then a great sorrow and
a dead waste of silence,--all this appeared to belong to some earlier
existence. And then the sun had seemed to rise on a fuller life that
came later. A holy change had come over her, and to her transfigured
feeling the world looked different. But that bright sun had set now,
and all around was gloom. Slowly she swayed herself to and fro hour
after hour in her chair, as one by one these memories came back to
her--came, and went, and came again.

On Rotha the care of the household had fallen. The young girl had sat
long by the old dame overnight, holding her hand and speaking softly
to her between the outbursts of her own grief. She had whispered
something about brave sons who would yet be her great stay, and then
the comforter herself had needed comfort and her voice of solace had
been stilled. When the daylight came in at the covered windows, Rotha
rose up unrefreshed; but with a resolute heart she set herself to the
duties that had dropped so unexpectedly upon her. She put the
spinning-wheel into the neuk window-stand and the woo-wheel against
the wall. They would not be wanted now. She cleared the sconce and
took down the flitches that hung from the rannel-tree to dry. Then she
cooked the early breakfast of oatmeal porridge, and took the milk that
the boy brought from the cow shed and put it into the dishes that she
had placed on the long oak table which stretched across the kitchen.

Willy Ray had been coming and going most of the night from the kitchen
to his own room--a little carpeted closet of a bedroom that went out
from the first landing on the stairs, and looked up to the ghyll at
the back. The wee place was more than his sleeping-room; he ha