“’Deed, I don’t think she cares.  She’s never mentioned his name.  D’you mind that ring of rubies she wears, like drops of blood all round the hoop?  ’Twas his.  She shifted it to the left hand, I saw.  It was broken once,—­and what do you think she did?  She put a blow-pipe at the candle-flame, and, holding it up in tiny pincers, soldered the two ends together without taking it off her finger,—­and it burning into the bone!  Strathsay grit.  It’s on her white wedding-finger.  The scar’s there, too.—­St!  Where’s your music?  You’ve not played a note these five minutes.  Whisht! here comes my mother!”

How was Helmar to darken my mother’s day, I couldn’t but think, as I began to toss off the tune again.  And poor Mary,—­there were more scars than I carried, in the house.  But while I turned the thoughts over, Angus came for me to dance, and Margray, he said, should play, and my mother signed consent, and so I went.

But ’twas a heavy heart I carried to and fro, as I remembered what I’d heard, and perhaps it colored everything else with gloom.  Why was Angus holding my hand as we glided? why was I by his side as we stood? and as he spoke, why was I so dazzled with delight at the sound that I could not gather the sense?  Oh, why, but that I loved him, and that his noble compassion would make him the same to me at first as ever,—­slowly, slowly, slowly lowering, while he turned to Effie or some other fair-faced lass?  Ah, it seemed to me then in a rebellious heart that my lot was bitter.  And fearful that my sorrow would abroad, I broke into a desperation of gayety till my mother’s hand was on my arm.  But all the while, Angus had been by, perplexed shadows creeping over his brow;—­and in fresh terror lest my hidden woe should rise and look him in the face, all my mother’s pride itself shivered through me, and I turned my shoulder on him with a haughty, pettish chill.

So after that first evening the days and nights went by, went by on leaden wings; for I wanted the thing over, it seemed I couldn’t wait, I desired my destiny to be accomplished and done with.  Angus was ever there when occasion granted,—­for there were drives and sails and rambles to lead him off; and though he’d urge, I would not join them, not even at my mother’s bidding,—­she had taught me to have a strange shrinking from all careless eyes;—­and then, moreover, there were dinners and balls, and them he must needs attend, seeing they were given for him,—­and I fancy here that my mother half repented her decree concerning the time when I should enter society, or, rather, should not,—­yet she never knew how to take step in recedure.

But what made it hardest of all was a word of Margray’s one day as I sat over at her house hushing the little Graeme, who was sore vexed with the rash, and his mother was busy plaiting ribbons and muslins for Effie,—­Effie, who seemed all at once to be blossoming out of her slight girlhood into the perfect rose of the woman that Mary Strathsay was already, and about her nothing lingering rathe or raw, but everywhere a sweet and ripe maturity.  And Margray said,—­