And the little sprite got in, keeping her head and the little cup of a bonnet protruding every moment to look round; yet if it could have been seen in the dark, with such a sly, half-humorous eye, as betokened one of those curiously-made creatures who seem to be formed for studies to the thoroughgoing decent pacers of the world’s stage.

“Ah! now we’re all safe, as poor Charlie will be to-morrow,” she cried, as they got to the foot of the long row, and she emerged in the light of one of the lamps, so like a flash from a cloud, running before her mother to get her to walk faster and faster, as if some scheme she had in her head was loitering under the impediment of her mother’s wearied, oh, wearied step.

Having at length reached home, Jeannie ran and got the fire as bright as her own eye, crying out occasionally, as she glanced about,

“Poor Charlie in a dungeon!” and again, a few minutes after, when puffing at the fire with the bellows,

“No fire for dear Charlie; all dark and dismal!”

And then, running for the little paper packet with the cheese and bread, and setting it down,

“But he’ll see the sun to-morrow, and will sleep in his own bed to-morrow night too; that he shall.  Now eat, mother, for you will be hungry; and see you this!” as she took from her pocket a very tiny bottle, which would hold somewhere about a glass.

“Take that,” filling out a little whisky.

“Oh dear, dear bairn, where learnt ye a’ that witchery?” said the mother, looking at her.

But the sly look, sometimes without a trace of laughter in her face, was the only answer.

And now they are stretched in bed in each other’s arms; but it was a restless night for both.  And how different the manifestations of the restlessness!  The groans of the elder for the fate of her only boy, now suspended on the scales of justice—­one branch of the balance to be lopt off by Nemesis, and the other left with a noose in the string whereon to hang that erring, yet still beloved son; hysterical laughs from Jeannie in her dreams, as she saw herself undo the kench, and Charlie let out, clapping his hands, and praying too, and kissing Jeannie, and other fantastic tricks of fancy in her own domain, unburdened with heavy clay which soils and presses upon her wings and binds her to earth, and to these monstrous likenesses of things, which she says are all a lying nature under the bonds of a blind fate, from where she cannot get free, even though she screams of murder and oppression and cruelty, and all the ills that earth-born flesh inherits from the first man.

Yet, for all these deductions from the sleep they needed, Jeannie was up in the morning early, infusing tea for herself and mother, muttering, as she whisked about,

“No breakfast for him made by me, who love him so dearly; but in this very house, ay, this night, he will have supper; and such a supper!”