“I look for ghosts, but none will force
       Their way to me:  ’tis falsely said
   That there was ever intercourse
       Betwixt the living and the dead: 
   For surely then I should have sight
      Of him I wait for day and night
   With love and longings infinite.”

Still, in the depth of her heart she did not believe Robert Roy was dead; for her finger was still empty of that ring—­her mother’s ring—­which he had drawn off, promising its return “when he was dead or she was married.”  This implied that he never meant to lose sight of her.  Nor, indeed, had he wished it, would it have been very difficult to find her, these ten years having been spent entirely in one place, an obscure village in the south of England, where she had lived as governess—­first in the squire’s family, then the rector’s.

From the Dalziel family, where, as she had said to Mr. Roy, she hoped to remain for years, she had drifted away almost immediately; within a few months.  At Christmas old Mrs. Dalziel had suddenly died; her son had returned home, sent his four boys to school in Germany, and gone back again to India.  There was now, for the first time for half a century, not a single Dalziel left in St. Andrews.

But though all ties were broken connecting her with the dear old city, her boys still wrote to her now and then, and she to them, with a persistency for which her conscience smote her sometimes, knowing it was not wholly for their sakes.  But they had never been near her, and she had little expectation of seeing any of them ever again, since by this time she had lived long enough to find out how easily people do drift asunder, and lose all clue to one another, unless some strong firm will or unconquerable habit of fidelity exists on one side or the other.

Since the Dalziels she had only lived in the two families before named, and had been lately driven from the last one by a catastrophe, if it may be called so, which had been the bitterest drop in her cup since the time she left St. Andrews.

The rector—­a widower, and a feeble, gentle invalid, to whom naturally she had been kind and tender, regarding him with much the same sort of motherly feeling as she had regarded his children—­suddenly asked her to become their mother in reality.

It was a great shock and a pang:  almost a temptation; for they all loved her, and wished to keep her.  She would have been such a blessing, such a brightness, in that dreary home.  And to a woman no longer young, who had seen her youth pass without any brightness in it, God knows what an allurement it is to feel she has still the power of brightening other lives.  If Fortune had yielded—­if she had said yes, and married the rector—­it would have been hardly wonderful, scarcely blamable.  Nor would it have been the first time that a good, conscientious, tender-hearted woman has married a man for pure tenderness.