the town rabble met her with sticks and stones and closed the
case; for on her way a cobble cast by some unknown hand struck her upon
the temple, and falling into the arms of the guard, she never spoke after,
but breathed her last breath as they forced her through the mob to the
prison gates.

This was the tale told to me; and long before I heard it the reprobation
of the vulgar had swung back from Janet Burns and settled upon her
accuser. Certain it was that swiftly upon the woman's murder--as I may
well call it--Miss Catherine made a recovery, nor was thereafter troubled
with fits, swoons or ailments calling for public notice. Indeed, she was
shunned by all, and lived (as well as I could discover) in complete
seclusion for twenty years, until the minister of Givens sought her out
with an offer of marriage.

By this time she was near forty; a thin, hard-featured spinster,
dwelling alone with her mother the Lady Balgarnock. Her two younger
sisters had married early--the one to Captain Luce, of Dunragit in
Wigtownshire, the other to a Mr. Forbes, of whom I know nothing save that
his house was in Edinburgh: and as they had no great love for Miss
Catherine, so they neither sought her company nor were invited to
Balgarnock. Her father, Sir John, had deceased a few months before Mr.
Johnstone presented himself.

He made a short courtship of it. The common tongues accused him (as was
to be expected) of coming after her money; whereas she and her old mother
lived a cat-and-dog life together, and she besides was of an age when
women will often marry the first man that offers. But I now believe, and
(unless I mistake) the history will show, that the excuse vulgarly made
for her did not touch the real ground of her decision. At any rate, she
married him and lived from 1718 to 1725 in the manse at Givens, where I
made her acquaintance.

I had been warned what to expect. The parishioners of Givens seldom had
sight of her, and set it down to pride and contempt of her husband's
origin. (He had been a weaver's son from Falkirk, who either had won his
way to the Marischal College of Aberdeen by strength of will and in
defiance of natural dullness, or else had started with wits but blunted
them in carving his way thither.) She rarely set foot beyond the manse
garden, the most of her time being spent in a roomy garret under the
slates, where she spun a fine yarn and worked it into thread of the kind
which is yet known as "Ba