As I left the room Dorothy was in tears, and Sir George was walking the floor in a towering rage.  The girl had learned that I was right in what I had told her concerning her father’s violent temper.

I went at once to my room in Eagle Tower and collected my few belongings in a bundle.  Pitifully small it was, I tell you.

Where I should go I knew not, and where I should remain I knew even less, for my purse held only a few shillings—­the remnant of the money Queen Mary had sent to me by the hand of Sir Thomas Douglas.  England was as unsafe for me as Scotland; but how I might travel to France without money, and how I might without a pass evade Elizabeth’s officers who guarded every English port, even were I supplied with gold, were problems for which I had no solution.

There were but two persons in Haddon Hall to whom I cared to say farewell.  They were Lady Madge and Will Dawson.  The latter was a Scot, and was attached to the cause of Queen Mary.  He and I had become friends, and on several occasions we had talked confidentially over Mary’s sad plight.

When my bundle was packed, I sought Madge and found her in the gallery near the foot of the great staircase.  She knew my step and rose to greet me with a bright smile.

“I have come to say good-by to you, Cousin Madge,” said I. The smile vanished from her face.

“You are not going to leave Haddon Hall?” she asked.

“Yes, and forever,” I responded.  “Sir George has ordered me to go.”

“No, no,” she exclaimed.  “I cannot believe it.  I supposed that you and my uncle were friends.  What has happened?  Tell me if you can—­if you wish.  Let me touch your hand,” and as she held out her hands, I gladly grasped them.

I have never seen anything more beautiful than Madge Stanley’s hands.  They were not small, but their shape, from the fair, round forearm and wrist to the ends of the fingers was worthy of a sculptor’s dream.  Beyond their physical beauty there was an expression in them which would have belonged to her eyes had she possessed the sense of sight.  The flood of her vital energy had for so many years been directed toward her hands as a substitute for her lost eyesight that their sensitiveness showed itself not only in an infinite variety of delicate gestures and movements, changing with her changing moods, but they had an expression of their own, such as we look for in the eyes.  I had gazed upon her hands so often, and had studied so carefully their varying expression, discernible both to my sight and to my touch, that I could read her mind through them as we read the emotions of others through the countenance.  The “feel” of her hands, if I may use the word, I can in no way describe.  Its effect on me was magical.  The happiest moments I have ever known were those when I held the fair blind girl by the hand and strolled upon the great terrace or followed the babbling winding course of dear old Wye, and drank in the elixir of all that is good and pure from the cup of her sweet, unconscious influence.