dropped into a seat near the corner of the fire-placestunned.

"Stay here," continued Norman; "whatever society you may choose in preference to mine at another time, you must endure it now. I have many questions to ask you; and first of all respecting our mother."

At any more propitious moment that mother's dear name would have been a sound of most sweet and welcome sadness-at any other time Alice would have spoken with sober gladness and chastened grief of sufferings meekly endured, of death in its most painful garb so resignedly met-but now she could not bear it, and the tears which scarcely fell from her fevered lids, dried up as they rose by the fire within, were no facile shower, leaving a pensive joy behind, but slow, scalding drops, wrung from her unaccustomed eyes by the intolerable rack of suspense. She did not rightly hear her own voice, she could scarcely collect her distracted thoughts to answer his, for the echoing strokes of the old wooden clock on the wall behind her beat on her brain as if every swing of the pendulum were a death-knell, ringing out the fate of the hunted and doomed man her soul loved-each half-hour melting away like a second, each second extending itself into a century of nightmare oppression. Surely, if there were any truth in the boasted invincibility of the human will, Norman would long since have departed, for every energy of her being, the whole intensity of volition of which she was capable, had centred on one point-to thrust, to urge, to drive him from her. The irritation of listening and speaking grew at last so

cruel that it overcame even her gentleness; could such a thing have been possible, Alice would have hated him then.

"I cannot bear it, Norman; I will tell you nothing more of sorrows which you were too callous to share, and which, if you had been a son to the mother that bore you, you would have kenned as I ken them, from my own too bitter knowledge. Ask me no more, speak to me no more, let me be-I am weary and sick unto death, of myself, of you, of everything ——

She shrunk further still into her dark corner, and, with compressed lips and fingers knit until the nails cut through the soft flesh, numbered the grains of sand as they ran out from the last hour which could avail her. He could almost have touched her by stretching out his arm, yet between them rose an adamantine rampart built up of her love and of his hate, which had been slowly growing for many a year, and could never be broken through now.

Just as the last weak thread which held the straining anchor of hope was giving way, to leave Alice tossed on a sea of desperation that might have drifted her, who knows whither?-Norman quitted his seat, and came close to her.

"Alice, have you money?"

66

Money? do you need it?" she said.

"I do greatly, and for the moment have no means of procuring it. The business which has brought me to Edinburgh will be terminated within a very short time, and I shall be obliged to leave."

"Soon?" she asked greedily.

66

To-night, I believe-it does not depend entirely upon myself."

She had gone the instant he addressed her to the old cabinet where she kept her little treasure, and offered him the purse containing Lady Glencarrig's gift.

"Take this, and welcome."

"What does it contain, Alice?"

"Gold, more than I need; I have no use for it, and shall never touch it."

worst

It seemed a strange circumstance to her, even in the bewilderment of her forlorn hope, amidst this rekindling of the spark in the half-dead ashes, that her brother, jealous to excess, authoritative and interfering in the merest trifles, and prone to put the very construction on the most innocent actions of everyday occurrence—one, in short, who reversed on all possible occasions the divine precept of thinking no evil— should accept from her what could not be other than a considerable sum without making the most insignificant inquiry as to its origin; but so it was; he simply weighed the purse in his hand, and bestowed it in a safe place, saying carelessly, as a matter of course,

"I will repay you."

"No, no, it was given to me, and I will give it to you," said Alice hastily, retreating again to her former nook; she dared not meet his eye. Norman took up his bonnet and old grey cloak, as if, now that the object of his visit was attained, he had no other inducement to stay. Perhaps he had not calculated upon doing so with such facility; but, if Alice had owned

the riches of Golconda and Peru, she would have poured them out at his feet to purchase his absence, had it lasted but ten minutes.

*

*

*

*

Conscience is said to make cowards of us all, and this axiom may perhaps account for the fact that Master Jock Maclean, as he stole homewards somewhere about a quarter of an hour before the ten o'clock drum sounded, experienced a notable diminution in his usual devil-may-care indifference to temporal or spiritual foes. That young gentleman (believed by his judicious parent to be enjoying in his little attic bed the sleep popularly assigned to innocence as its exclusive privilege) was at this precise moment of the night sneaking back from a forbidden party of pleasure in forbidden company, and anxiously enumerating the successive stages of his ascent to the aforesaid place of repose at which there was a chance of his being entrapped and submitted incontinently to corporeal chastisement, as absent without leave. The valuable monitor to which we have alluded spoke pretty loudly in the prodigal's breast; and, by raising ideas of condign punishment hovering over him in some shape or another, gave additional terrors to the clutch, short, sharp, and sudden, which arrested his cautious tread on the threshold of the still open door of his mother's hospitable establishment, and was instantly followed by a corresponding seizure of the other shoulder.

Jock's Nemesis had indeed trodden on the heels of his offence. Here was sharp practice! Dame Christie's was of that description in which the culprit

is hung first and tried afterwards, commonly called Jeddart justice, and Jock knew it.

"Eh! oh! chow! oh, mammy!" pleaded the crestfallen culprit; "I'll never do't again. It was a' the faut o' Syme Brand and Tam Leckie that beguiled me; ye maun lay the wyte on them

And Jock ignominiously slid down on to his knees, for, unable to see an inch before him in the gloomy cntry, he very naturally concluded that his captor was one in authority, who, apprised of his nocturnal jaunts, had lain in ambush to convict him in flagrante delicto. "Whisht ye, Jock!" and a soft little hand covered his mouth; "hush! it is I, Alice."

Jock scrambled up and took hold of her arm. They could not see each other, for the corridor had no lamp, and the thing presented itself in such a ludicrous point of view to the boy's mind, always on the look out for diversion, that he was obliged to stifle a laugh.

"Have ye been out barnsbreaking too, Alice?" he whispered.

"Jock, dear Jock! you must do something for me. I have been lurking here outby to see you, or some one who could tell you how much I longed to speak with you. I dare not trust your mother, or your brother. You must serve me to-night, and prevent a dreadful

deed."

The opening and shutting of a door and the scuffling of fect in a distant part of the house made the girl start violently. Jock slunk very close, closer than quite beseemed his manhood; much inclined, if the truth must out, to hide behind her; but no one