quick to choke down and smother the understanding; swift to leap up in

flame at a mention of that hope, which spoke volumes to her vanity and

her love, that she might one day be Mrs. Weir of Hermiston; swift, also,

to recognise in his stumbling or throttled utterance the death-knell of

these expectations, and constant, poor girl! in her large-minded

madness, to go on and to reck nothing of the future. But these

unfinished references, these blinks in which his heart spoke, and his

memory and reason rose up to silence it before the words were well

uttered, gave her unqualifiable agony. She was raised up and dashed

down again bleeding. The recurrence of the subject forced her, for

however short a time, to open her eyes on what she did not wish to see;

and it had invariably ended in another disappointment. So now again, at

the mere wind of its coming, at the mere mention of his father's name -

who might seem indeed to have accompanied them in their whole moorland

courtship, an awful figure in a wig with an ironical and bitter smile,

present to guilty consciousness - she fled from it head down.

"Ye havena told me yet," she said, "who was it spoke?"

"Your aunt for one," said Archie.

"Auntie Kirstie?" she cried. "And what do I care for my Auntie

Kirstie?"

"She cares a great deal for her niece," replied Archie, in kind reproof.

"Troth, and it's the first I've heard of it," retorted the girl.

"The question here is not who it is, but what they say, what they have

noticed," pursued the lucid schoolmaster. "That is what we have to

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