ler concerning her
sister's elopement, which contained many particulars that she had been
unable to extract from her father.

Jeanie learned, therefore, that, for three days after her pardon had
arrived, Effie had been the inmate of her father's house at St.
Leonard's--that the interviews betwixt David and his erring child, which
had taken place before she was liberated from prison, had been touching
in the extreme; but Butler could not suppress his opinion, that, when he
was freed from the apprehension of losing her in a manner so horrible,
her father had tightened the bands of discipline, so as, in some degree,
to gall the feelings, and aggravate the irritability of a spirit
naturally impatient and petulant, and now doubly so from the sense of
merited disgrace.

On the third night, Effie disappeared from St. Leonard's, leaving no
intimation whatever of the route she had taken. Butler, however, set out
in pursuit of her, and with much trouble traced her towards a little
landing-place, formed by a small brook which enters the sea betwixt
Musselburgh and Edinburgh. This place, which has been since made into a
small harbour, surrounded by many villas and lodging-houses, is now
termed Portobello. At this time it was surrounded by a waste common,
covered with furze, and unfrequented, save by fishing-boats, and now and
then a smuggling lugger. A vessel of this description had been hovering
in the firth at the time of Effie's elopement, and, as Butler
ascertained, a boat had come ashore in the evening on which the fugitive
had disappeared, and had carried on board a female. As the vessel made
sail immediately, and landed no part of their cargo, there seemed little
doubt that they were accomplices of the notorious Robertson, and that the
vessel had only come into the firth to carry off his paramour.

This was made clear by a letter which Butler himself soon afterwards
received by post, signed E. D., but without bearing any date of place or
time. It was miserably ill written and spelt; sea-sickness having
apparently aided the derangement of Effie's very irregular orthography
and mode of expression. In this epistle, however, as in all that
unfortunate girl said or did, there was something to praise as well as to
blame. She said in her letter, "That she could not endure that her father
and her sister should go into banishment, or be partakers of her
shame,--that if her burden was a heavy one, it was of her own binding,
and she