get from it one last look directed to the wooden figure.  Too late!  Kalee had died, not only away from her people, but away from the gods of her people.  All of a sudden the ayah ceased her endeavours, and directed her eagle eye, suffused with tears, up to the roof.  Quick words followed the look.  Aminadab could not understand them, but the motions and aspirations convinced him that she cried, “There, there, Brahma; there she goes, to be of thy eternal and infinite soul, from which she came, and to which she flies.”

Then, suddenly, she rushed out of the dungeon.  Aminadab looked after her.  She did not go to Logie House, but in the direction of the wood, whither the indescribable figure had gone.  Aminadab heard no more, scarcely saw more, if it was not the corpse lying before him.  He was afraid of Janet, more of Fletcher, who might now at length come to pass his eyes over the body in the Cradle, where he was to cherish her as a father cherisheth his child; yet he would look, and look again.  How shrivelled that face of darkness, yet how calm and loving-like; as if, even in the midst of the agony of the last hour, it smiled love to her destroyer!

By-and-by a light again approached.  It was Janet with a white sheet.

“You here!  Good heavens!  Away, away!  Fletcher is to look at her; yes, he is to look at her in the cradle he promised her.  Away! no more.”

“I saw Brahma,” said Aminadab; “yes, true Brahma, Brahma!”

“Fool, fool!  Man, I only told you it was Brahma to keep you from the Cradle for your own safety.”

“Then who was the strange being?”

“I dare not tell you that; but I fear Ady’s away with him, without hat, or cloak, or box, or supper.”

“To where?”

“Nor that, lad.  But I fear you will hear more of this Scotch tragedy some day.  Get you gone; there is Fletcher.”

Aminadab obeyed.

And Fletcher did see her.  Some time after the departure of Aminadab he crossed the green.  It seemed that night he had refrained from company, not through penitence, or any motive that man could divine in the nature of the man.  Strangely-formed beings do things which do not seem to belong to their natures or to human nature, and it is this that makes them strange.  Before he entered this, not, alas!  Domdaniel, he called Janet to the door.  He wanted to be alone.  She gave him the cruse; and with the old gloom upon his face, perhaps he wanted to test his courage.  It could not be that he wanted to look once more on the face of the mother of his children; nor that he felt now that there had been one in the world who really did love him, as few women have ever loved.  Then man measures woman’s love by his own; but when was man’s heart stirred by nature’s strongest passion like that of devoted woman? while now the world did not contain one heart that was moved to him by anything stronger than dithyrambic delirium.  Who knows?  But there was Fletcher