she
not only felt things keenly, but retained the sting of them after the
things were nearly forgotten. But then the swift and rare response of
her faculties arose in no small measure from this impressionableness.
At the same time, but for instincts and impulses derived from her race,
her sensitiveness might have degenerated into weakness.

CHAPTER LI.

A DREAM.

One evening, as Donal was walking in the little avenue below the
terraces, Davie, who was now advanced to doing a little work without
his master's immediate supervision, came running to him to say that
Arkie was in the schoolroom and wanted to see him.

He hastened to her.

"A word with you, please, Mr. Grant," she said.

Donal sent the boy away.

"I have debated with myself all day whether I should tell you," she
began--and her voice trembled not a little; "but I think I shall not be
so much afraid to go to bed if I do tell you what I dreamt last night."

Her face was very pale, and there was a quiver about her mouth: she
seemed ready to burst into tears.

"Do tell me," said Donal sympathetically.

"Do you think it very silly to mind one's dreams?" she asked.

"Silly or not," answered Donal, "as regards the general run of dreams,
it is plain you have had one that must be minded. What we must mind, it
cannot be silly to mind."

"I am in no mood, I fear, for philosophy," she rejoined, trying to
smile. "It has taken such a hold of me that I cannot get rid of it, and
there is no one I could tell it to but you; any one else would laugh at
me; but you never laugh at anybody!

"I went to bed as well as usual, only a little troubled about my
uncle's strangeness, and soon fell asleep, to find myself presently in
a most miserable place. It was like a brick-field--but a deserted
brick-field. Heaps of broken and half-burnt bricks were all about. For
miles and miles they stretched around me. I walked fast to get out of
it. Nobody was near or in sight; there was not a sign of human
habitation from horizon to horizon.

"All at once I saw before me a dreary church. It was old, tumble-down,
and dirty--not in the least venerable--very ugly--a huge building
without shape, like most of our churches. I shrank from the look of it:
it was more horrible to me than I could account for; I feared it. But I
must go in--why, I did not know, but I must: the dream itself compelled
me.

"I went in. It looked as if nobody had crossed its threshold for a
hundred year