nger string.

Having heard the adventure, Mr. Lammie produced a shilling from the
pocket of his corduroys, and gave it to Robert to spend upon the needful
string. He resolved to go to the town the next morning and make a grand
purchase of the same. During the afternoon he roamed about the farm
with his hands in his pockets, revolving if not many memories, yet
many questions, while Shargar followed like a pup at the heels of
Miss Lammie, to whom, during his former visit, he had become greatly
attached.

In the evening, resolved to make a confidant of Mr. Lammie, and indeed
to cast himself upon the kindness of the household generally, Robert
went up to his room to release his violin from its prison of brown
paper. What was his dismay to find--not his bonny leddy, but her poor
cousin, the soutar's auld wife! It was too bad. Dooble Sanny indeed!

He first stared, then went into a rage, and then came out of it to go
into a resolution. He replaced the unwelcome fiddle in the parcel, and
came down-stairs gloomy and still wrathful, but silent. The evening
passed over, and the inhabitants of the farmhouse went early to bed.
Robert tossed about fuming on his. He had not undressed.

About eleven o'clock, after all had been still for more than an hour,
he took his shoes in one hand and the brown parcel in the other, and
descending the stairs like a thief, undid the quiet wooden bar that
secured the door, and let himself out. All was darkness, for the moon
was not yet up, and he felt a strange sensation of ghostliness in
himself--awake and out of doors, when he ought to be asleep and
unconscious in bed. He had never been out so late before, and felt as
if walking in the region of the dead, existing when and where he had no
business to exist. For it was the time Nature kept for her own quiet,
and having once put her children to bed--hidden them away with the world
wiped out of them--enclosed them in her ebony box, as George Herbert
says--she did not expect to have her hours of undress and meditation
intruded upon by a venturesome school-boy. Yet she let him pass. He
put on his shoes and hurried to the road. He heard a horse stamp in
the stable, and saw a cat dart across the corn-yard as he went through.
Those were all the signs of life about the place.

It was a cloudy night and still. Nothing was to be heard but his own
footsteps. The cattle in the fields were all asleep. The larch and
spruce trees on the top of the hill by the