voice she faced about.

"Pick together the silver, Kirstie, and fetch me my bonnet!" At first
Mrs. Johnstone began to totter about the room without aim, but presently
fell to choosing this and that of her small possessions and tossing them
into the seat of the armchair in a nervous hurry which seemed to gather
with her strength. "Quick, lass! Did he see you? . . . ah, but that
would not tell him. What like was he?" She pulled herself together and
her voice quavered across the room. "Lass, lass, you will not forsake me?
Do not speir now, but do all that I say. You promised--you did promise!"
All this while she was working in a fever of haste, pulling even the quilt
from the bed and anon tossing it aside as too burdensome. She was past
all control. "Do not speir of me," she kept repeating.

"What, ma'am? Are we leaving?" Kirstie stammered once; but the strong
will of the woman--mad though she might be--was upon her, and by-and-by
the girl began packing in no less haste than her mistress. "But will you
not tell me, ma'am?" she entreated between her labours.

"Not here! not here!" Mrs. Johnstone insisted. "Help me to get away from
here!"

It was two in the morning when the women unlatched the door of the cottage
and crept forth across the threshold--and across the stain of blood which
lay thereon, only they could not see it. They took the footpath, each
with a heavy bundle beneath her arm, and turning their backs on Givens
walked resolutely forward for three miles to the cross-roads where the
Glasgow coach would be due to pass in the dawn. Upon the green there
beside the sign-post Kirstie believes that she slept while Mrs. Johnstone
kept guard over the bundles; but she remembers little until she found
herself, as if by magic, on the coach-top and dozing on a seat behind the
driver.

From Glasgow, after a day's halt, they took another coach to Edinburgh,
and there found lodgings in a pair of attics high aloft in one of the
great houses, or lands, which lie off Parliament Square to the north.
The building--a warren you might call it--had six stories fronting the
square, the uppermost far overhanging, and Kirstie affirms that her
window, pierced in the very eaves, stood higher than the roof of St.
Giles' Church.

Hither in due course a carrier's cart conveyed Mrs. Johnstone's sticks of
furniture, and here for fifteen months the two women lay as close as two
needles in a bottle of hay. The house stood upo