me they smothered her between two feather-beds, just as the house
of Bogbonnie was ready to receive her furniture, and become her future
dwelling. No one had ever occupied it.

If Miss St. John listened to story and song without as much show of
feeling as Mysie Lindsay would have manifested, it was not that she
entered into them less deeply. It was that she was more, not felt less.

Listening at her window once with Robert, Eric Ericson had heard Mary
St. John play: this was their first meeting. Full as his mind was of
Mysie, he could not fail to feel the charm of a noble, stately womanhood
that could give support, instead of rousing sympathy for helplessness.
There was in the dignified simplicity of Mary St. John that which made
every good man remember his mother; and a good man will think this grand
praise, though a fast girl will take it for a doubtful compliment.

Seeing her begin to look weary, the young men spread a couch for her as
best they could, made up the fire, and telling her they would be in the
hall below, retired, kindled another fire, and sat down to wait for
the morning. They held a long talk. At length Robert fell asleep on the
floor.

Ericson rose. One of his fits of impatient doubt was upon him. In the
dying embers of the fire he strode up and down the waste hall, with
the storm raving around it. He was destined to an early death; he would
leave no one of his kin to mourn for him; the girl whose fair face
had possessed his imagination, would not give one sigh to his memory,
wandering on through the regions of fancy all the same; and the
death-struggle over, he might awake in a godless void, where, having
no creative power in himself, he must be tossed about, a conscious yet
helpless atom, to eternity. It was not annihilation he feared, although
he did shrink from the thought of unconsciousness; it was life without
law that he dreaded, existence without the bonds of a holy necessity,
thought without faith, being without God.

For all her fatigue Miss St. John could not sleep. The house quivered in
the wind which howled more and more madly through its long passages
and empty rooms; and she thought she heard cries in the midst of the
howling. In vain she reasoned with herself: she could not rest. She rose
and opened the door of her room, with a vague notion of being nearer to
the young men.

It opened upon the narrow gallery, already mentioned as leading from one
side of the first floor to the ot