On the day I speak of, we had been teased by a visit from Mrs. Bonithorne, who, professing great sorrow for our loss, and her own loss of one whom she called her oldest friend, soon fell to talking of Andrew, and how his unlucky doings were all owing to our good aunt’s foolishness in entertaining so pestilent a heretic as James Westrop under her roof.

‘I warned her of it,’ quoth she; ’I said to her, “You will rue it yet, Margaret; with such an one you should have no dealings, no, not so much as to eat,” and now see what has come of her perverseness!’ and such-like stuff she said, which moved Grace Standfast to say disdainfully, when our visitor was gone, ’Yon woman surely owes us a little grudge, that ’twas our house and not hers which entertained so rare a monster as a wandering Quaker; she asked me twenty questions about him the day after, I remember it well; but we hardly had heart to laugh, though we were sure enough she had given no such warnings as she spake of.  Althea only sighed and said, ’’twas an evil day for her when she first saw that man;’ and as she told me, his two appearances to us haunted her as she went to rest, and mingled themselves with her dreams.  She woke at last sharply and suddenly, thinking she heard the hail rattling against the windows as it did when Mr. Truelocke preached his last sermon in our church; but it was not hail that rattled, it was some one throwing sand and pebbles up at her window to wake her, and then a voice calling on her name.  She sprang up, and, hurrying on some clothes, she ran down-stairs; for, as she told me, she had no more doubt of its being Andrew who called, than if it had been broad daylight, and she could see him standing below the window; and, being too impatient to unlock any door, she undid the hasp of the nearest casement and climbed out; and at the same moment hearing a voice again calling softly, ‘Althea,’ she ran in the direction of the sound, and came upon a man whom in the starlight she saw to be Andrew indeed; she spoke his name, holding out both her hands, and he turning at once grasped them in both his, and so they stood gazing at each other awhile.  Then she said, half sobbing,—­

’You come strangely, Andrew—­but you come to your own house, and I am glad that it falls to me to welcome you to it; it lacks a master sadly;’ and she tried to draw him towards the door, telling him she would set it open if he would tarry a few minutes while she herself climbed in to do it.

‘Alas!’ he said, resisting her efforts; ’what do you mean by calling this my house? is our aunt indeed gone?  I had hoped that part of the message might be a delusion.’

’What message?  I sent none, for I knew not where to send, nor did any of us,’ she replied; ’but it is too true that Mrs. Golding is dead these ten days; and all things are at a stand for lack of your presence.  Come in; do not keep me here in the darkness and the cold.’

‘I will not keep thee long,’ he said sadly; ’fear it not, Althea.  But I may not come under this roof which thou sayest is mine.  I saw the dim light in your window,’ he went on, like one talking in a dream, ’and I could not bear to pass by and make no sign, as I ought to have done.  For I love thee too well, Althea Dacre, as thou knowest.’