ed that her courageous good sense was plainly to be
counted upon. From the first her respectful phrases had not attempted to
conceal from him the anxiety she had felt.

"It was the way she looked and that I hadn't expected to see such a
change, that took the strength out of me the first time I saw her. And
what your lordship had told me. It seemed as if the two things together
were too much for her to face. I watch over her day and night though I
try to hide from her that I watch so close. If she could be made to eat
something, and to sleep, and not to break her little body to pieces with
those dreadful fits of crying, there would be something to hold on to.
But I shall hold on to her, my lord, whether there is anything to hold
on to or not."

He knew she would hold on but as the weeks passed and she faithfully
told him what record the days held he saw that in each she felt that she
had less and less to grasp. And then came a letter which plainly could
not conceal ominous discouragement in the face of symptoms not to be
denied--increasing weakness, even more rapid loss of weight, and less
sleep and great exhaustion after the convulsions of grief.

"It couldn't go on and not bring on the worst. It is my duty to warn
your lordship," the letter ended.

For she had not "wakened up" though somehow Dowie had gone on from day
to day wistfully believing that it would be only "Nature" that she
should. Dowie had always believed strongly in "Nature." But at last
there grew within her mind the fearsome thought that somehow the very
look of her charge was the look of a young thing who had done with
Nature--and between whom and Nature the link had been broken.

There were beginning to be young lambs on the hillside and Jock Macaur
was tending them and their mothers with careful shepherding. Once or
twice he brought a newborn and orphaned one home wrapped in his plaid
and it was kept warm by the kitchen fire and fed with milk by Maggy to
whom motherless lambs were an accustomed care.

There was no lamb in his plaid on the afternoon when he startled Dowie
by suddenly appearing at the door of the room where she sat sewing-- It
was a thing which had never happened before. He had kept as closely to
his own part of the place as if there had been no means of egress from
the rooms he and Maggy lived in. His face sometimes wore an anxious look
when he brought back a half-dead lamb, and now though his plaid was
empty his weather-beaten c