ess out came the lance, and Robbie was bled. Then sundry
hums and ahs, but no syllable of counsel or cheer.

"Is there any danger?" asked little Liza in a fretful tone. She was
standing with head averted from the bowl which was in her mother's
hands, with nervous fingers and palpitating breast.

The wise man replied in two guarded words.

Robbie had appeared to be conscious before the operation of the lance.
He was wandering again. He would soon be wildly delirious.

The great man took up his hat and his fee together. His silence at
least had been golden.

"Didsta iver see sic a dumb daft boggle?" said Mattha as the doctor
disappeared. "It cannot even speak when it's spoken to."

The medical ghost never again haunted that particular ghost-walk.

Robbie lay four days insensible, and Mrs. Branthwaite was
thenceforward his sole physician and nurse. On the afternoon of the
third day of Robbie's illness--it was Sunday--Rotha Stagg left her own
peculiar invalid in the care of one of the farm women and walked over
to Mattha's house.

Willy Ray had not returned from Carlisle. He had exchanged scarcely
six words with her since the interview previously recorded. Rotha had
not come to Shoulthwaite for Willy's satisfaction. Neither would she
leave it for his displeasure.

When the girl reached the weaver's cottage and entered the sick-room,
Mattha himself was sitting at the fireside, with a pipe, puffing the
smoke up the chimney. Mrs. Branthwaite was bathing the sick man's
head, from which the hair had been cut away. Liza was persuading
herself that she was busy sewing at a new gown. The needle stuck and
stopped twenty times a minute. Robbie was delirious.

"Robbie, Robbie, do you know who has come to see you?" said Liza,
bending over him.

"Ey, mother, ey, here I am, home at last," muttered Robbie.

"He's ram'lin' agen," said Mattha from the chimney corner.

"Bless your old heart, mammy, but I'll mend my management. I will,
that I will. It's true _this_ time, mammy, ey, it is. No, no; try me
again just _once_, mammy!"

"He's forever running on that, poor lad," whispered Mattha. "I reckon
it's been a sair point with him sin' he put auld Martha intil t'
grund."

"Don't greet, mammy; don't greet."

Poor Liza found the gown wanted close attention at that moment. It
went near enough to her eyes.

"I say it was fifty strides to the north of the bridge! Swear it? Ey,
swear it!" cried Robbie at a fuller pitch of his