t thing is to keep
her mind soothed."

Kirstie did not understand. A few minutes later as she went up the stairs
to her room the door opposite still remained open. All was dark within,
but whether or not Mrs. Johnstone sat there in the darkness she could not
tell.

The next morning she entered on her duties, which were light enough.
Indeed, she soon suspected that her mistress had sought a companion
rather than a servant, and at first had much to-do to find employment.
Soon, however, Mrs. Johnstone took her into confidence, and began to
impart the mysteries of whitening and twisting the famous Balgarnock
thread; and so by degrees, without much talk on either side, there grew a
strange affection betwixt them. Sure, Kirstie must have been the first of
her sex to whom the strange woman showed any softness; and on her part the
girl asserts that she was attracted from the first by a sort of pity,
without well knowing for what her pity was demanded. The minister went no
farther with his confidences: he could see that Kirstie suited, and seemed
resolved to let well alone. The wife never spoke of herself; and albeit,
if Kirstie's reading happened to touch on the sources of Christian
consolation, she showed some eagerness in discussing them, it was done
without any personal or particular reference. Yet, even in those days,
Kirstie grew to feel that terror was in some way the secret of her
mistress's strangeness; that for the present the poor woman knew herself
safe and protected from it, but also that there was ever a danger of that
barrier falling--whatever it might be--and leaving her exposed to some
enemy, from the thought of whom her soul shrank.

I do not know how Kirstie became convinced that, whoever or whatever the
enemy might be, Mr. Johnstone was the phylactery. She herself could give
no grounds for her conviction beyond his wife's anxiety for his health and
well-being. I myself never observed it in a woman, and if I had, should
have set it down to ordinary wifely concern. But Kirstie assures me,
first, that it was not ordinary, and, secondly, that it was not at all
wifely--that Mrs. Johnstone's care of her husband had less of the
ministering unselfishness of a woman in love than of the eager concern of
a gambler with his stake. The girl (I need not say) did not put it thus,
yet this in effect was her report. And she added that this anxiety was
fitful to a degree: at times the minister could hardly take a