dear."

Darling Lorna wept again, because the old man could not tell her (except
by one very feeble nod) that she was doing what he wished. Then she gave
to me the trinket, for the sake of safety; and I stowed it in my breast.
He seemed to me to follow this, and to be well content with it.

Before Sir Ensor Doone was buried, the greatest frost of the century
had set in, with its iron hand, and step of stone, on everything. How
it came is not my business, nor can I explain it; because I never have
watched the skies; as people now begin to do, when the ground is not to
their liking. Though of all this I know nothing, and less than nothing I
may say (because I ought to know something); I can hear what people tell
me; and I can see before my eyes.

The strong men broke three good pickaxes, ere they got through the hard
brown sod, streaked with little maps of gray where old Sir Ensor was to
lie, upon his back, awaiting the darkness of the Judgment-day. It was in
the little chapel-yard; I will not tell the name of it; because we are
now such Protestants, that I might do it an evil turn; only it was the
little place where Lorna's Aunt Sabina lay.

Here was I, remaining long, with a little curiosity; because some people
told me plainly that I must be damned for ever by a Papist funeral; and
here came Lorna, scarcely breathing through the thick of stuff around
her, yet with all her little breath steaming on the air, like frost.

I stood apart from the ceremony, in which of course I was not entitled,
either by birth or religion, to bear any portion; and indeed it would
have been wiser in me to have kept away altogether; for now there was no
one to protect me among those wild and lawless men; and both Carver
and the Counsellor had vowed a fearful vengeance on me, as I heard from
Gwenny. They had not dared to meddle with me while the chief lay dying;
nor was it in their policy, for a short time after that, to endanger
their succession by an open breach with Lorna, whose tender age and
beauty held so many of the youths in thrall.

The ancient outlaw's funeral was a grand and moving sight; more perhaps
from the sense of contrast than from that of fitness. To see those dark
and mighty men, inured to all of sin and crime, reckless both of man and
God, yet now with heads devoutly bent, clasped hands, and downcast eyes,
following the long black coffin of their common ancestor, to the place
where they must join him when their sum of