am delighted at the
reason, for wouldn't it have been terrible to think that my marriage
with George Balgarnie of Balgruddery was a thing of so small a note as
not to be known everywhere?"

If Mysie Craig had appeared shortly before to Miss Gilroy paler than any
snow her ladyship had ever seen, she must now have been as pale as some
other kind of snow that nobody ever saw. The dreadful words had indeed
produced the adequate effect, but not in the most common way, for we are
to keep in view that it is not the most shrinking and sensitive natures
that are always the readiest to faint; and there was, besides, the
aforesaid conviction of impossibility which, grasping the mind by a
certain force, deadened the ear to words implying the contrary. Mysie
stood fixed to the spot, as if she were trying to realize some certainty
she dared not think was possible, her lips apart, her eyes riveted on
the face of the lady--mute as that kind of picture which a certain
ancient calls a silent poem, and motionless as a figure of marble.

An attitude and appearance still more inexplicable to Anabella, perhaps
irritating as an unlucky omen, and therefore not possessing any claim
for sympathy--at least it got none.

"Are you the Mysie Craig," she cried, as she looked at the girl, "who
used to chat to me about the dresses you brought, and the flowers on
them? Ah, jealous and envious, is that it? But you forget, George
Balgarnie never could have made _you_ his wife--a working needlewoman;
he only fancied you as the plaything of an hour. He told me so himself
when I charged him with having been seen in your company. So, Mysie, you
may as well look cheerful. Your turn will come next with some one in
your own station."

There are words which stimulate and confirm; there are others that seem
to kill the nerve and take away the sense, nor can we ever tell the
effect till we see it produced; and so we could not have told
beforehand--nay, we would have looked for something quite opposite--that
Mysie, shrinking and irritable as she was by nature, was saved from a
faint (which had for some moments been threatening her) by the cruel
insult which thus had been added to her misfortune. She had even power
to have recourse to that strange device of some natures, that of
"affecting to be not affected;" and casting a glance at the fine lady,
she turned and went away without uttering a single word. But who knows
the pain of the conventional concealment of