to me than has come already? Tell him I will
ay try to be good. And he will tell my mother, if he goes first where
she has gone--" Her voice failed her.

"Have you friends anywhere to whom you can go?"

"I'll go to Willie some time, if you take him home with you. Only it
must be a long, long time first, for _he_ will keep his eye on Willie,
and he would find me. And Willie himself mustna ken where I am, for if
he came to me he might be followed. I must just lose myself for a
while, for if _he_--_that man_--were to find me--"

Her colour had come back, and her eyes shone with feverish brightness.
What could he say to her? He tore a leaf from his note-book, and wrote
his name and his American address upon it.

"Come to me and you shall have a safe home with my wife and children.
Come now, or when you feel that you can come safely, though it be ten
years hence. You shall have a welcome and a home."

She gave him her hand, and thanked him, and prayed God to bless him, and
then she turned to do as Janet Mair had bidden her. But first she knelt
down beside the new-made grave, and, at the sight, Alexander Hadden
bared and bowed his head. When he raised it again she was gone.

When the minister opened the parcel which Allison Bain had sent him, he
found folded within it her marriage lines and a plain gold ring.

CHAPTER TWO.

"Martinmas dowie did wind up the year."

The little town of Nethermuir stands in the shire of "bonnie Aberdeen,"
though not in the part of it which has been celebrated in song and story
for beauty or for grandeur. But in summertime the "gowany braes" which
lie nearest to it, and the "heather braes" into which they gradually
change as they rise higher in the distance, have a certain beauty of
their own. So have the clear brown burns which water its narrow fields,
and the belts of wood which are planted here and there on the hillsides.

In summertime, even the little town itself, as it was fifty years ago
and more, might be called a pretty place, at least the lanes about it
were pretty. There were many lanes about it, some of them shaded by
tall firs or spreading beeches, others shut in by grassy dikes which
inclosed the long, narrow "kail-yards" running back from the clusters of
dwellings which fronted the narrow streets. There were tall laburnums
here and there, and larch and rowan trees, and hedges of hawthorn or
elder, everywhere, some of them shutting in gardens full of suc