all too quickly for poor Tom
Fairlie.

One evening, when hanging up his hat in the hall, Jack's father took him
by the hand and led him silently into the library.

"Father, father," cried Jack, "what has happened?"

"A bolt from the blue, my boy; a bolt from the blue."

CHAPTER VII.

"WENT GLIDING AWAY LIKE A BEAUTIFUL GHOST."

"They bid me forget her--oh, how can it be?
In kindness or scorn she's ever wi' me;
I feel her fell frown in the lift's frosty blue,
An' I weel ken her smile in the lily's saft hue.
I try to forget her, but canna forget,
I've liket her lang, an' I aye like her yet."
THOM, _the Inverury Poet_.

Richards, the kindly old solicitor, with Jack and his sister Flora and
the general--these formed the group in the solemn, dark-panelled library
of Grantley Hall on that beautiful summer's evening. The light of the
westering sun stole in through the high stained windows, and cast
patches of light and colour on the furniture and on the floor. Mackenzie
had already told his son all the story of his troubles, and while he had
yet been talking, the curtains in the doorway were drawn back, and
Flora appeared, leaning on the arm of her good friend Richards.

The general had lifted up a deprecating hand.

"No need, no need." This from the family lawyer. "Flora already knows
all. And bravely has she borne the tidings. Ah, my good sir, Flora is a
true Mackenzie."

"But you might have told me long ago," was all she had said as she
seated herself on a low stool by her father's knee. "O father, I could
have borne it, and could have comforted you, now that poor mother has
gone!"

There was silence for a time, broken by Flora's low sobbing; broken,
too, by the sweet, mellow fluting of a blackbird in the garden
shrubbery.

General Mackenzie was the first to speak.

"Children," he said, "I have been for many a day like one living in a
dream, call it if you will a fool's paradise. But I have awakened at
last to the stern realities of life. It is better, perhaps, as it is,
for we now know the very worst. You will believe me when I say that if I
have hidden the truth from you, it was because I feared to vex you, or
render you unhappy, while yet there was hope. But now," he added, "all
is over, all is lost, or seems to be."

"Nay, nay, my good old friend," cried Richards; "you must not really
take so gloomy a view as that of the matt