he speired for proof that we was needing, and my father couldna speak.  He just pointed at me.  ’But you have a good coat on your back yoursel’,’ Mr. Duthie said, for there were mony waiting, sair needing.  ‘It was lended him to come here,’ I cried, and without a word my father opened the coat, and they saw he had nothing on aneath, and his skin blue wi’ cauld.  Dominie, Mr. Duthie handed him one shilling and saxpence, and my father’s fingers closed greedily on’t for a minute, and syne it fell to the ground.  They put it back in his hand, and it slipped out again, and Mr. Duthie gave it back to him, saying, ’Are you so cauld as that?’ But, oh, man, it wasna cauld that did it, but shame o’ being on the rates.  The blood a’ ran to my father’s head, and syne left it as quick, and he flung down the siller and walked out o’ the Town House wi’ me running after him.  We warstled through that winter, God kens how, and it’s near a pleasure to me to think o’t now, for, rain or no rain, I can never be reduced to sic straits again.”

The farmer crossed the water without using the stilts which were no longer necessary, and I little thought, as I returned to the school-house, what terrible things were to happen before he could offer me his snuff-mull again.  Serious as his talk had been it was neither of drought nor of the incident at the Spittal that I sat down to think.  My anxiety about Gavin came back to me until I was like a man imprisoned between walls of his own building.  It may be that my presentiments of that afternoon look gloomier now than they were, because I cannot return to them save over a night of agony, black enough to darken any time connected with it.  Perhaps my spirits only fell as the wind rose, for wind ever takes me back to Harvie, and when I think of Harvie my thoughts are of the saddest.  I know that I sat for some hours, now seeing Gavin pay the penalty of marrying the Egyptian, and again drifting back to my days with Margaret, until the wind took to playing tricks with me, so that I heard Adam Dishart enter our home by the sea every time the school-house door shook.

I became used to the illusion after starting several times, and thus when the door did open, about seven o’clock, it was only the wind rushing to my fire like a shivering dog that made me turn my head.  Then I saw the Egyptian staring at me, and though her sudden appearance on my threshold was a strange thing, I forgot it in the whiteness of her face.  She was looking at me like one who has asked a question of life or death, and stopped her heart for the reply.

“What is it?” I cried, and for a moment I believe I was glad she did not answer.  She seemed to have told me already as much as I could bear.

“He has not heard,” she said aloud in an expressionless voice, and, turning, would have slipped away without another word.

“Is any one dead?” I asked, seizing her hands and letting them fall, they were so clammy.  She nodded, and trying to speak could not.