e empty craving, were her portion; and out of such
unnatural hollowness have arisen, once and again, deadly lust and sin.

Why had none stepped in between her and this cruel mockery and
temptation? "Mother, mother, how could you be false to your trust? Were
you, too, cheated and bereft of your due? left a cold, shrinking woman,
withering, not suddenly, but for a whole lifetime?"

Leslie sat long weighing her burden, until a tap at the door and Bridget
Kennedy's voice disturbed her. "Earlscraig is gone, madam; Master Hector
is sitting alone with his thoughts in your room. May be, he is missing
his cup of tea, or, if you please, madam, his lady's company that he is
used to at this hour."

Leslie rose mechanically, walked out, and entered her drawing-room. What
did he there, his eyes fixed on the broken turret of Earlscraig, defined
clearly on the limited horizon, his memory hovering over the fate of
fair Alice Boswell?

Was it horrible to be jealous of a dead woman? to wish herself in that
ever-present grave, sacred to him as the holiest, though no priest
blessed it, no house of God threw over it the shadow of the finger
pointed to heaven--the cross that bore a world's Saviour? But that swift
and glowing passage from life and light and love, such as his to
darkness, forgetfulness--eternity. How could she have faced it? Bridget,
her old enemy, had prayed she might be delivered from it, whatever her
trials.

"Nigel Boswell is gone at last; he was an old playfellow, and fortune
and he have been playing a losing game ever since," he said, in
unsuspecting explanation, as he joined her where she sat in her
favourite window.

She did not answer him; she was stunned, and sat gazing abstractedly on
the wallflowers rendering golden the mossy court wall, or far away on
the misty Otter sea. She thought he had relapsed into his reveries, was
with the past, the spring-tide of his life, the passion of his early
manhood, while she was a little school-girl tripping demurely and safely
along the crowded Glasgow streets. If she had looked up at him she would
have seen that he was observing her curiously--wondering where his young
wife had acquired that serious brow, those fixed eyes.

"What are you thinking of, Leslie?"

"Nothing; I cannot tell," hastily and resolutely.

"That sounds suspicious." He put his hand on her head, as he had a habit
of doing, but she recoiled from him.

"A shy little brain that dreads a finger of mine