onybody on the very day my
poor"--

Here his voice choked, and he could proceed no farther; but as he had
risen when Lord Glenallan came in, and had since remained standing,
he now threw himself doggedly upon a seat, and remained in the sullen
posture of one who was determined to keep his word.

But the old woman, whom this crisis seemed to repossess in all those
powers of mental superiority with which she had once been eminently
gifted, arose, and advancing towards him, said, with a solemn voice,
"My son, as ye wad shun hearing of your mother's shame--as ye wad not
willingly be a witness of her guilt--as ye wad deserve her blessing and
avoid her curse, I charge ye, by the body that bore and that nursed ye,
to leave me at freedom to speak with Lord Geraldin, what nae mortal ears
but his ain maun listen to. Obey my words, that when ye lay the moulds
on my head--and, oh that the day were come!--ye may remember this hour
without the reproach of having disobeyed the last earthly command that
ever your mother wared on you."

The terms of this solemn charge revived in the fisherman's heart the
habit of instinctive obedience in which his mother had trained him up,
and to which he had submitted implicitly while her powers of exacting
it remained entire. The recollection mingled also with the prevailing
passion of the moment; for, glancing his eye at the bed on which the
dead body had been laid, he muttered to himself, "He never disobeyed me,
in reason or out o' reason, and what for should I vex her?" Then, taking
his reluctant spouse by the arm, he led her gently out of the cottage,
and latched the door behind them as he left it.

As the unhappy parents withdrew, Lord Glenallan, to prevent the old
woman from relapsing into her lethargy, again pressed her on the subject
of the communication which she proposed to make to him.

"Ye will have it sune eneugh," she replied;--"my mind's clear eneugh now,
and there is not--I think there is not--a chance of my forgetting what I
have to say. My dwelling at Craigburnfoot is before my een, as it were
present in reality:--the green bank, with its selvidge, just where the
burn met wi' the sea--the twa little barks, wi' their sails furled, lying
in the natural cove which it formed--the high cliff that joined it with
the pleasure-grounds of the house of Glenallan, and hung right ower the
stream--Ah! yes--I may forget that I had a husband and have lost him--
that I hae but ane alive of ou