The years were now to be counted as seven since Janet Dodds was plunged into the deep pool of the North Loch, and the state of mind of the married criminals, which we have tried to describe, had been growing and growing, for two of these years, as if it threatened to get stronger the older they grew, and the nearer the period of judgment.  One morning when they were in bed—­for even yet, while they concealed their thoughts from each other, and the name of Jenny Dodds was a condemned word in their vocabulary, even as the sacred name among the Romans, they had evinced no spoken enmity to each other—­they heard a tirl at the door.  The hour was early, and the douce genius of the grey dawn was deliberating with herself whether it was time to give place to her advancing sister, the morning.  Mrs. Mary Dodds rose to answer the knock, and Thomas listened with natural curiosity to know who the early visitor was, and what was wanted.  He heard a suppressed scream of fear from his wife, and the next moment she came rushing into the room; yet the never a word she uttered, and her lips were so white and dry that you might have supposed that her silence was the result of organic inability.  Nor even when she got into bed again, and tried to hide her head with the bed-clothes, did her terror diminish, or her lips become more obedient to the feeling within; so that Thomas knew not what to think, except it was that she had seen a ghost—­not an unnatural supposition at a time when occult causes and spiritual appearances were as undoubted as the phenomena of the electric telegraph are in our day.  But he was not destined to be left many minutes more in ignorance of the cause of Mrs. Mary Dodds’s terror, for, upon listening, he heard some one come into the kitchen, and bolt the door on the inside—­so much for his ears; then he turned his eyes to the kitchen, into which he could, as well as the light of the grey dawn would permit, see from where he lay; and what did he see?

  “How comes it? whence this mimic shape? 
  In look and lineament so like our kind. 
  You might accost the spectral thing, and say,
  ‘Good e’en t’ye.’”

No other than the figure of Mrs. Janet Dodds herself.  Yes, there she was in her old grey dress, busy taking off that plaid which Thomas knew so well, and hanging the same upon the peg, where she had hung it so often for five long years.  Thomas was now as completely deprived of the power of speech as she who lay, equally criminal as himself, alongside of him; but able at least to look, or rather, unable to shut their eyes, they watched the doings of the strange morning visitor.  They saw that she was moving about as if she were intent upon domestic work; and, by-and-by, there she was busy with coals and sticks brought from their respective places, putting on the fire, which she lighted with the indispensable spunk applied to the spark in the tinder-box.  Next she undertook the sweeping of the floor, saying to herself—­and they heard