I grew troubled, these nocturnal visits continuing, and wished that I could help her.  I thought if I could only find out whose the photograph was, perhaps I might.

One night I could bear it no longer.  I am aware that I must seem a most prying old woman; but somehow or other this library was fated to be mixed up with my life.  I rose and just peeped round the library door to see what she was doing.  She was standing in the clear moonlight—­not, as I had expected, with an open photograph album, but holding a little miniature, taken from its place on the table.  I went back to bed, my heart bounding.  I knew now!  I did not sleep much that night.

Perhaps I acted rashly—­but I thought I should apply to Paul for help.  I was sure, from various signs, that he did not hate my Janet’s bairn now.  I told him of these stolen visits to the library, and tried to persuade him to conceal himself and watch there—­for the purpose of finding out whose the portrait was.  I did not tell him, deceitful woman that I was, that I myself already knew.  Old people like him and me, I said, should help the child out of her trouble.  I must have startled him terribly:  he grew, at first, so white.  Then he looked at me long and intently; and by-and-by began to cross-examine me.  We were canny Scots, both of us, and fenced.

“You say it was a photograph you saw her with?”

“I did not say I saw her.”

“You have heard her open an album?”

“I have heard her move books.”

I have seen the time when I could have broken a lance with the best; but I was growing old, and he finished by getting me into rather a hobble—­when he abruptly left me, a great flush sweeping over his face.  He came back by-and-by, and took me out into the garden.  If he never had been the real old Paul before—­he was so now.  He cut the pansies from my best cap, and decorated Duncan’s coat-of-arms—­which had broken out about the walls now-a-days—­with them.  But he might have cut the cap in two for all I cared just then.

That night—­I hoped he had not forgotten—­I hoped he would come.  Presently I heard a quiet step which I knew to be his.  Then I sat down and listened again.  Swish, swish—­here she was at last.  I had listened too often to the soft rustle of her trailing gown to make any mistake now.  In my excitement—­you see I was an old habitue at prying and peering about the library by this time—­I put one eye round the door, at her very back.  She had gone a few steps into the room—­and now stood, rooted to the spot, startled.  There, with his face—­and all that he would have it say—­fair and bright in the moonlight, stood Paul.  He opened his arms.

“Janet,” he said.

With a little cry, and a sob, the girl rushed into them.