So the week ended and Sunday came, kept at Mrs. Dalziel’s like the Scotch Sundays of twenty years ago.  No visitor ever entered the house, wherein all the meals were cold and the blinds drawn down, as if for a funeral.  The family went to church for the entire day, St. Andrews being too far off for any return home “between sermons.”  Usually one servant was left in charge, turn and turn about; but this Sunday Mrs. Dalziel, having put the governess in the nurse’s place beside the ailing child, thought shrewdly she might as well put her in the servant’s place too, and let her take charge of the kitchen fire as well as of little David.  Being English, Miss Williams was not so exact about “ordinances” as a Scotch woman would have been; so Mrs. Dalziel had no hesitation in asking her to remain at home alone the whole day in charge of her pupil.

Thus faded, Fortune thought, her last hope of seeing Robert Roy again, either at church—­where he usually sat in the Dalziel pew, by the old lady’s request, to make the boys “behave”—­or walking down the street, where he sometimes took the two eldest to eat their “piece” at his lodgings.  All was now ended; yet on the hope—­or dread—­of this last Sunday she had hung, she now felt with what intensity, till it was gone.

Fortune was the kind of woman who, were it given her to fight, could fight to the death, against fate or circumstances; but when her part was simply passive, she could also endure.  Not, as some do, with angry grief or futile resistance, but with a quiet patience so complete that only a very quick eye would have found out she was suffering at all.

Little David did not, certainly.  When hour after hour, she sat by his sofa, interesting him as best she could in the dull “good” books which alone were allowed of Sundays, and then passing into word-of-mouth stories—­the beautiful Bible stories over which her own voice trembled while she told them—­Ruth, with her piteous cry, “Whither thou goest, I will go; where thou diest, I will die, and there will I be buried;” Jonathan, whose soul “clave to the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul”—­all these histories of passionate fidelity and agonized parting—­for every sort of love is essentially the same—­how they went to her heart.

Oh, the awful quietness of that Sunday, that Sabbath which was not rest, in which the hours crawled on in sunshiny stillness, neither voices nor steps nor sounds of any kind breaking the death-like hush of everything.  At length the boy fell asleep; and then Fortune seemed to wake up for the first time to the full consciousness of what was and what was about to be.

All of a sudden she heard steps on the gravel below; then the hall bell rang through the silent house.  She knew who it was even before she opened the door and saw him standing there.

“May I come in?  They told me you were keeping house alone, and I said I should just walk over to bid you and Davie good-by.”