Tuesday was a wet morning.  The bright days were done.  Soon after dawn Fortune had woke up and watched the sunrise, till a chill fog crept over the sea and blotted it out; then gradually blotted out the land also, the Links, the town, every thing.  A regular St. Andrews “haar;” and St. Andrews people know what that is.  Miss Williams had seen it once or twice before, but never so bad as this—­blighting, penetrating, and so dense that you could hardly see your hand before you.

But Fortune scarcely felt it.  She said to herself, “Today is Tuesday,” which meant nothing to any one else, every thing to her.  For she knew the absolute faithfulness, the careful accuracy, in great things and small, with which she had to do.  If Robert Roy said, “I will write on such a day,” he was as sure to write as that the day would dawn; that is, so far as his own will went; and will, not circumstance, is the strongest agent in this world.

Therefore she waited quietly for the postman’s horn.  It sounded at last.

“I’ll go,” cried Archy.  “Just look at the haar!  I shall have to grope my way to the gate.”

He came back, after what seemed an almost endless time, rubbing his head and declaring he had nearly blinded himself by running right into the laurel bush.

“I couldn’t see for the fog.  I only hope I’ve left none of the letters behind.  No, no; all right.  Such a lot!  It’s the Indian mail.  There’s for you, and you, boys.”  He dealt them out with a merry, careless hand.

There was no letter for Miss Williams—­a circumstance so usual that nobody noticed it or her, as she sat silent in her corner, while the children read noisily and gaily the letters from their far-away parents.

Her letter—­what had befallen it?  Had he forgotten to write?  But Robert Roy never forgot any thing.  Nor did he delay any thing that he could possibly do at the time he promised.  He was one of the very few people in this world who in small things as in great are absolutely reliable.  It seemed so impossible to believe he had not written, when he said he would, that as a last hope, she stole out with a plaid over her head and crept through the sidewalks of the garden, almost groping her way through the fog, and, like Archy, stumbling over the low boughs of the laurel bush to the letter-box it held.  Her trembling hands felt in every corner, but no letter was there.

She went wearily back; weary at heart, but patient still.  A love like hers, self-existent and sufficient to itself, is very patient, quite unlike the other and more common form of the passion; not love, but a diseased craving to be loved, which causes a thousand imaginary miseries and wrongs.  Sharp was her pain, poor girl; but she was not angry, and after her first stab of disappointment her courage rose.  All was well with him; he had been seen cheerily starting for Edinburgh; and her own temporary suffering was a comparatively a small thing.  It could not last:  the letter would come tomorrow.