“Yes, Miss Craig, and surely you must have heard who the gentleman is; for does not the town ring of it from the castle to the palace, from Kirk-o’-Field to the Calton?”

“I have not been out,” said Mysie.

“That accounts for it,” continued the lady; “and I am delighted at the reason, for wouldn’t it have been terrible to think that my marriage with George Balgarnie of Balgruddery was a thing of so small a note as not to be known everywhere?”

If Mysie Craig had appeared shortly before to Miss Gilroy paler than any snow her ladyship had ever seen, she must now have been as pale as some other kind of snow that nobody ever saw.  The dreadful words had indeed produced the adequate effect, but not in the most common way, for we are to keep in view that it is not the most shrinking and sensitive natures that are always the readiest to faint; and there was, besides, the aforesaid conviction of impossibility which, grasping the mind by a certain force, deadened the ear to words implying the contrary.  Mysie stood fixed to the spot, as if she were trying to realize some certainty she dared not think was possible, her lips apart, her eyes riveted on the face of the lady—­mute as that kind of picture which a certain ancient calls a silent poem, and motionless as a figure of marble.

An attitude and appearance still more inexplicable to Anabella, perhaps irritating as an unlucky omen, and therefore not possessing any claim for sympathy—­at least it got none.

“Are you the Mysie Craig,” she cried, as she looked at the girl, “who used to chat to me about the dresses you brought, and the flowers on them?  Ah, jealous and envious, is that it?  But you forget, George Balgarnie never could have made you his wife—­a working needlewoman; he only fancied you as the plaything of an hour.  He told me so himself when I charged him with having been seen in your company.  So, Mysie, you may as well look cheerful.  Your turn will come next with some one in your own station.”

There are words which stimulate and confirm; there are others that seem to kill the nerve and take away the sense, nor can we ever tell the effect till we see it produced; and so we could not have told beforehand—­nay, we would have looked for something quite opposite—­that Mysie, shrinking and irritable as she was by nature, was saved from a faint (which had for some moments been threatening her) by the cruel insult which thus had been added to her misfortune.  She had even power to have recourse to that strange device of some natures, that of “affecting to be not affected;” and casting a glance at the fine lady, she turned and went away without uttering a single word.  But who knows the pain of the conventional concealment of pain except those who have experienced the agony of the trial?  Even at the moment when she heard that George Balgarnie was to be married, and that she came to know that she had been for weeks sewing the