hem suddenly in a retired place, when Margaret was weeping bitterly,
and Ludovic tossing his arms, seemingly in wrath and distraction. All
agreed that of late he had led a disturbed and reckless life--and that
something dark and suspicious had hung about him, wherever he went, as
if he were haunted by an evil conscience. But did not strange men
sometimes pass through the Moor--squalid mendicants, robber-like, from
the far-off city--one by one, yet seemingly belonging to the same
gang--with bludgeons in their hands--half-naked, and often drunken in
their hunger, as at the doors of lonesome houses they demanded alms; or
more like footpads than beggars, with stern gestures, rising up from the
ditches on the wayside, stopped the frightened women and children going
upon errands, and thanklessly received pence from the poor? One of them
must have been the murderer! But then, again, the whole tide of
suspicion would set in upon Ludovic--her lover; for the darker and more
dreadful the guilt, the more welcome is it to the fears of the
imagination when its waking dreams are floating in blood.

A tall figure came forward from the porch, and all was silence when the
congregation beheld the Father of the suspected criminal. He stood still
as a tree in a calm day--trunk, limbs, moved not--and his grey head was
uncovered. He then stretched out his arm, not in an imploring, but in a
commanding attitude, and essayed to speak; but his white lips quivered,
and his tongue refused its office. At last, almost fiercely, he uttered,
"Who dares denounce my son?" and like the growling thunder the crowd
cried, "All--all--he is the murderer!" Some said that the old man
smiled; but it could have been but a convulsion of the features--outraged
nature's wrung-out and writhing expression of disdain, to show how a
father's love brooks the cruelty of foolish falsehood and injustice.

Men, women, and children--all whom grief and horror had not made
helpless--moved away towards the Moor--the woman who had seen the sight
leading the way; for now her whole strength had returned to her, and she
was drawn and driven by an irresistible passion to look again at what
had almost destroyed her judgment. Now they were miles from the kirk,
and over some brushwood, at the edge of a morass some distance from the
common footpath, crows were seen diving and careering in the air, and a
raven, flapping suddenly out of the covert, sailed away with a savage
croak along a ra