--

"I know--I know it all," answered the Earl.

"You indeed know all that I can say--And now, heir of Glenallan, can you
forgive me?"

[Illustration: Lord Glenallen and Elspeth]

"Ask forgiveness of God, and not of man," said the Earl, turning away.

"And how shall I ask of the pure and unstained what is denied to me by
a sinner like mysell? If I hae sinned, hae I not suffered?--Hae I had a
day's peace or an hour's rest since these lang wet locks of hair first
lay upon my pillow at Craigburnfoot?--Has not my house been burned, wi'
my bairn in the cradle?--Have not my boats been wrecked, when a' others
weather'd the gale?--Have not a' that were near and dear to me dree'd
penance for my sin?--Has not the fire had its share o' them--the winds had
their part--the sea had her part?--And oh!" she added, with a lengthened
groan, looking first upwards towards Heaven, and then bending her eyes
on the floor--"O that the earth would take her part, that's been lang
lang wearying to be joined to it!"

Lord Glenallan had reached the door of the cottage, but the generosity
of his nature did not permit him to leave the unhappy woman in this
state of desperate reprobation. "May God forgive thee, wretched woman,"
he said, "as sincerely as I do!--Turn for mercy to Him who can alone
grant mercy, and may your prayers be heard as if they were mine own!--I
will send a religious man."

"Na, na--nae priest! nae priest!" she ejaculated; and the door of the
cottage opening as she spoke, prevented her from proceeding.

CHAPTER THIRTEENTH.

Still in his dead hand clenched remain the strings
That thrill his father's heart--e'en as the limb,
Lopped off and laid in grave, retains, they tell us,
Strange commerce with the mutilated stump,
Whose nerves are twinging still in maimed existence.
Old Play.

The Antiquary, as we informed the reader in the end of the thirty-first
CHAPTER, [tenth] had shaken off the company of worthy Mr. Blattergowl,
although he offered to entertain him with an abstract of the ablest
speech he had ever known in the teind court, delivered by the procurator
for the church in the remarkable case of the parish of Gatherem.
Resisting this temptation, our senior preferred a solitary path, which
again conducted him to the cottage of Mucklebackit. When he came in
front of the fisherman's hut, he observed a man working