down to think of all that she had heard.

It was not much. Crombie had seen two names on a headstone in the
kirkyard of Kilgower. That they were the names of her father and mother
she did not doubt. She had been greatly startled by all she had heard,
but she had not betrayed herself; and after all, had she not more cause
to be glad and thankful than to be afraid? Willie had put up that
stone! Was not that enough to make it sure that he had been at home,
and that all had been well with him? He might be at home yet, on his
own land. Or he might be on the sea--on his way to a new country which
was to give a home to them both. Glad tears came to Allison's eyes as
she knelt down and laid her face on Marjorie's pillow.

"I am glad and thankful," she said, "and I will not vex myself thinking
about what the old man said. It might just be by chance that he spoke
with no thought about me, except that the name was the same. I will be
thankful and have patience and wait. I am sure he would not wish to
harm me. Only if he were to speak of all that in the hearing of other
folk it might end in my having to go away again."

But the thought of having to go away did not seem so terrible to her as
it would have done a few months ago. Her courage had risen since then.
She had "come to herself," and she was reasonable both in her fears and
her hopes, and so she repeated, as she laid her head on her pillow:

"I will be thankful and have patience and wait. And I will put my trust
in God."

CHAPTER FIFTEEN.

"She courtsied low, she spoke him fair,
She sent him on his way;
She said as she stood smiling there,
You've wealth, and wiles, and wisdom rare,
But I have won the day."

Crombie did not leave the manse with an easy mind, and the more he
thought of what he had said, and what he had not said there, the more
uneasy he became. He was in a quandary, he told himself, putting the
accent on the last "a." To his surprise and consternation he found
himself in doubt as to the course he ought to pursue.

He had gone to the manse with the full intention of asking the
minister's lass whether she were the wife of the man whom he had seen
"glowering at the new headstane" in the kirkyard of Kilgower, and of
putting it to her conscience whether she was not breaking the laws of
God and man by keeping herself hidden out of his way.

But he had not asked her. He could not do it. He had come away with