“Now look here,” exclaimed Valentine, laying the letter down flat on the table, and holding it there with his hand—­“now look here, this is serious.  You are going to bring that simpleton Laura to me, and you would like to leave her here, would you?  Preposterous!  She cannot live with me!  Besides, I am such a fool myself, that if I was shut up with her long, I should certainly marry her.  Take a little time, Val, and consider.

     “’Wilt them brave? 
     Or wilt thou bribe? 
     Or wilt thou cheat the kelpie?’

“Let me see.  Laura is my own cousin, and the only Melcombe.  Now, if Craik had any sense of gratitude—­but he hasn’t—­it seems so natural, ’I built you a church, you marry my cousin.  Do I hear you say you won’t?  You’d better think twice about that.  I’d let you take a large slice of the turnip-field into your back garden.  Turnips, I need hardly add, you’d have ad lib. (very wholesome vegetables), and you’d have all that capital substantial furniture now lying useless in these attics, and an excellent family mangle out of the messuage or tenement called the laundry—­the wedding breakfast for nothing.  I think you give in, Craik?’ Yes; we shake hands—­he has tears in his eyes.  ’Now, Laura, what have you got to say?’ ‘He has sandy hair.’ ’Of course he has, the true Saxon colour.  Go down on your knees, miss, and thank heaven fasting for a good man’s love (Shakespeare).’ ‘And he has great red hands.’ ’Surely they had better be red than green—­celestial rosy red, love’s proper hue.’  Good gracious! here he is.”

“Ah, Craik! is that you?  How goes it?”

One of Mr. Craik’s gifts was that he could sigh better than almost anybody; whenever he was going to speak of anything as darkly mysterious, his sigh was enough to convince any but the most hardened.  He fetched a sigh then (that is the right expression)—­he fetched it up from the very bottom of his heart, and then he began to unfold his grievances to Valentine, how some of his best school-girls had tittered at church, how some of his favourite boys had got drunk, how some of the farmers had not attended morning service for a month, and how two women, regular attendants, had, notwithstanding, quarrelled to that degree that they had come to blows, and one of them had given the other a black eye, and old Becky Maddison is ill, he concluded.  “I’ve been reading to her to-day.  I don’t know what to think about administering the Holy Communion to her while she persists in that lie.”

“Do you mean the ghost story?” asked Valentine.

“Yes.”

“It may have been a lie when she first told it; but in her extreme old age she may have utterly forgotten its first invention.  It may possibly not be now a conscious lie, or, on the other hand, it may be true that she did see something.”

“Your grandmother always considered that it was a lie, and a very cruel lie.”

“How so?  She accused no one of anything.”