“I’d like to, Sophy, but I’m not free to do so.”
“You’re putting Madame’s bit of siller and the work she’s promised you from the Glamis girl before my heart-break. Oh, how can you?”
“Sophy, you have lived with me, and I saw you often dissatisfied and unreasonable for nothing at all.”
“I was a bit foolish lassie then. I am a poor, miserable, sick woman now.”
“You have no need to be poor, and miserable, and sick. I won’t encourage you to run away from your home and your duty. At any rate, bide where you are till your husband comes back. I would be wicked to give you any other advice.”
“You mean that you won’t let me come and stay with you?”
“No, I won’t. I would be your worst enemy if I did.”
“Then good-bye. You will maybe be sorry some day for the ‘No’ you have just said.”
She went slowly out of the store, and Griselda was very unhappy, and called to her to come back and wait for her carriage. She did not heed or answer, but walked with evident purpose down a certain street. It led her to the railway station, and she went in and took a ticket for Edinburgh. She had hardly done so when the train came thundering into the station, she stepped into it, and in a few minutes was flying at express rate to her destination. She had relatives in Edinburgh, and she thought she knew their dwelling place, having called on them with her Aunt Kilgour when they were in that city, just previous to her marriage. But she found that they had removed, and no one in the vicinity knew to what quarter of the town. She was too tired to pursue inquiries, or even to think any more that day, and she went to a hotel and tried to rest and sleep. In the morning she remembered that her mother’s cousin, Jane Anderson, lived in Glasgow at some number in Monteith Row. The Row was not a long one, even if she had to go from house to house to find her relative. So she determined to go on to Glasgow.
She felt ill, strangely ill; she was in a burning fever and did not know it. Yet she managed to get into the proper train, and to retain her consciousness for sometime afterwards, ere she succumbed to the inevitable consequences of her condition. Before the train reached its destination, however, she was in a desperate state, and the first action of the guard was to call a carriage and send her to a hospital.