do with us?
Listen, and I'll tell you how I found out. Papa brought the paper up
to Mamma, and said, 'Did you see this?' And then mamma read it, and the
color came all over her face, and she did not say a word, but went out
of the room pretty soon. And then I took up the paper, and looked at the
page she had been reading, and saw grandpapa's name."

"What was it about?" asked old Elspeth.

"That's just what I couldn't understand; it was all about secularists.
What are secularists? But it seems that this Luke Raeburn, whoever he
is, has lost his wife. While he was lecturing at Birmingham on the soul,
it is said, his wife died, and this paragraph said it seemed like a
judgment, which was rather cool, I think."

"Poor laddie!" signed old Elspeth.

"Elspeth," cried Rose, "do you know who the man is?"

"Miss Rose," said the old woman severely, "in my young days there was a
saying that you'd do well to lay to heart, 'Ask no questions, and you'll
be told no stories.'"

"It isn't your young days now, it's your old days, Elsie," said the
imperturbable Rose. "I will ask you questions as much as I please, and
you'll tell me what this mystery means, there's a dear old nurse! Have I
not a right to know about my own relations?"

"Oh, bairn, bairn! If it were anything you'd like to hear, but why
should you know what is all sad and gloomful? No, no, go to your balls,
and think of your fine dresses and gran' partners, though, for the
matter of that, it is but vanity of vanities--"

"Oh, if you're going to quote Ecclesiastes, I shall go!" said Rose,
pouting. "I wish that book wasn't in the Bible! I'm sure such an old
grumbler ought to have been in the Apocrypha."

Elspeth shook her head, and muttered something about judgment and
trouble. Rose began to be doubly curious.

"Trouble, sadness, a mystery--perhaps a tragedy! Rose had read of such
things in books; were there such things actually in the family, and
she had never known of them? A few hours ago and she had been unable to
think of anything but her first ball, her new dress, her flowers; but
she was seized now with the most intense desire to fathom this mystery.
That it bid fair to be a sad mystery only made her more eager and
curious. She was so young, so ignorant, there was still a halo of
romance about those unknown things, trouble and sadness.

"Elspeth, you treat me like a child!" she exclaimed; "it's really too
bad of you."

"Maybe you're right, bairn," said th