paring to spring. But she only watched, making neither
sound nor movement until the cortege was near enough for her to see that
every man's head was bowed upon his breast, and not one was covered.

Then she said, quite slowly, "They--have--taken off--their bonnets," and
fell upon the terrace like a dropped stone.

It was because of this that the girl said that she was dead when I was
born. It must have seemed almost as if she were not a living thing.
She did not open her eyes or make a sound; she lay white and cold.
The celebrated physicians who came from London talked of catalepsy
and afterward wrote scientific articles which tried to explain her
condition. She did not know when I was born. She died a few minutes
after I uttered my first cry.

I know only one thing more, and that Jean Braidfute told me after I grew
up. Jean had been my father's nursery governess when he wore his first
kilts, and she loved my mother fondly.

"I knelt by her bed and held her hand and watched her face for three
hours after they first laid her down," she said. "And my eyes were so
near her every moment that I saw a thing the others did not know her
well enough, or love her well enough, to see.

"The first hour she was like a dead thing--aye, like a dead thing that
had never lived. But when the hand of the clock passed the last second,
and the new hour began, I bent closer to her because I saw a change
stealing over her. It was not color--it was not even a shadow of a
motion. It was something else. If I had spoken what I felt, they would
have said I was light-headed with grief and have sent me away. I have
never told man or woman. It was my secret and hers. I can tell you,
Ysobel. The change I saw was as if she was beginning to listen to
something--to listen.

"It was as if to a sound--far, far away at first. But cold and white as
stone she lay content, and listened. In the next hour the far-off
sound had drawn nearer, and it had become something else--something she
saw--something which saw her. First her young marble face had peace in
it; then it had joy. She waited in her young stone body until you were
born and she could break forth. She waited no longer then.

"Ysobel, my bairn, what I knew was that he had not gone far from the
body that had held him when he fell. Perhaps he had felt lost for a bit
when he found himself out of it. But soon he had begun to call to her
that was like his own heart to him. And she had heard. And then