And little did her two girls imagine, as they called her down stairs that night, secretly wondering what important business could make “Auntie” keep tea waiting fully five minutes, and set her after tea to read some “pretty poetry,” especially Longfellow’s, which they had a fancy for—­little did they think, those two happy creatures, listening to their middle-aged governess, who read so well that sometimes her voice actually faltered over the line, how there was being transacted under their very eyes a story which in its “constant anguish of patience” was scarcely less pathetic than that of Acadia.

For nearly a year after that letter came the little family of which Miss Williams was the head went on in its innocent quiet way, always planning, yet never making a change, until at last fate drove them to it.

Neither Helen nor Janetta were very healthy girls, and at last a London doctor gave as his absolute fiat that they must cease to live in their warm inland village, and migrate, for some years at any rate, to a bracing sea-side place.

Whereupon David Dalziel, who had somehow established himself as the one masculine adviser of the family, suggested St. Andrews.  Bracing enough it was, at any rate:  he remembered the winds used almost cut his nose off.  And it was such a nice place too, so pretty, with such excellent society.  He was sure the young ladies would find it delightful.  Did Miss Williams remember the walk by the shore, and the golfing across the Links?

“Quite as well as you could have done, at the early age of seven,” she suggested, smiling.  “Why are you so very anxious we should go to live at St. Andrews?”

The young fellow blushed all over his kindly eager face, and then frankly owned he had a motive.  His grandmother’s cottage, which she had left him, the youngest and her pet always, was now unlet.  He meant, perhaps, to go and live at it himself when—­he was of age and could afford it; but in the mean time he was a poor solitary bachelor, and—­and—­

“And you would like me to keep your nest warm for you till you can claim it?  You want us for your tenants, eh, Davie?”

“Just that.  You’ve hit it.  Couldn’t wish better.  In fact, I have already written to my trustees to drive the hardest bargain possible.”

Which was an ingenious modification of the truth, as she afterward found; but evidently the lad had set his heart upon the thing.  And she?

At first she shrank back from the plan with a shiver almost of fear.  It was like having to meet face to face something—­some one—­long dead.  To walk among the old familiar places, to see the old familiar sea and shore, nay, to live in the very same house, haunted, as houses are sometimes, every room and every nook, with ghosts—­yet with such innocent ghosts—­Could she bear it?

There are some people who have an actual terror of the past—­who the moment a thing ceases to be pleasurable fly from it, would willingly bury it out of sight forever.  But others have no fear of their harmless dead—­dead hopes, memories, loves—­can sit by a grave-side, or look behind them at a dim spectral shape, without grief, without dread, only with tenderness.  This woman could.