terrors of her early death. So the next time her mother tapped on
the pannel with her undaunted, unwearied "Ay or no, Nelly Carnegie? Gin
the bridal be not this week, I'll bid him tarry another; and gin he
weary and ride awa', I'll keep ye steekit here till I'm carried out a
corp before ye, and I'll leave ye my curse to be coal and candle, and
sops and wine, for the lave o' yer ill days."

Nelly gasped out a husky, wailing "Ay," and her probation was at an end.

III.--A MOURNFUL MARRIAGE EVE.

There was brief space now for Nelly's buying pearlins and pinners, and
sacques and mantles, and all a young matron's bravery, or for decorating
a guest chamber for the ceremony. But Lady Carnegie was not to be balked
for trifles. Nanny Swinton stitched night and day, with salt tears from
aged eyes moistening her thread; and Nelly did not swerve from her
compact, but acted mechanically with the others as she was told. With a
strange pallor on the olive of her cheek, and swollen, burning lids,
drooping over sunk violent lines beneath the hot eyeballs, and cold,
trembling hands, she bore Staneholme's stated presence in these long,
bleak March afternoons. He never addressed her particularly, although he
took many a long, sore look. Few and formal then were the lover's
devoirs expected or permitted.

The evening was raw and rainy; elderly gentlemen would have needed
"their lass with a lantern," to escort them from their chambers. The
old city guard sputtered their Gaelic, and stamped up and down for
warmth. The chairmen drank their last fee to keep out the cold--and
in and out of the low doorways moved middle-aged women barefooted,
and in curch and short gown, who, when snooded maidens, had gazed on
the white cockade, and the march of Prince Charlie Stuart and his
Highlandmen. Down the narrow way, in the drizzly dusk, ran a slight
figure, entirely muffled up. Fleet of foot was the runner, and blindly
she held her course. Twice she came in contact with intervening
obstacles--water-stoups on a threshold, gay ribbons fluttering from a
booth. She was flying from worse than death, with dim projects of
begging her way to the North, to the brother she had parted from when a
child; and ghastly suggestions, too, like lightning flashes, of seizing
a knife from the first butcher's block and ending her misery.

Hasty steps were treading fast upon her track. She distinguished them
with morbid acuteness through the speed of her own flight. Th