“That's just what I couldn't understand; it was all about secularists. What are secularists? But it seems that this Luke Raeburn, whoever he is, has lost his wife. While he was lecturing at Birmingham on the soul, it is said, his wife died, and this paragraph said it seemed like a judgment, which was rather cool, I think.”
“Poor laddie!” signed old Elspeth.
“Elspeth,” cried Rose, “do you know who the man is?”
“Miss Rose,” said the old woman severely, “in my young days there was a saying that you'd do well to lay to heart, 'Ask no questions, and you'll be told no stories.'”
“It isn't your young days now, it's your old days, Elsie,” said the imperturbable Rose. “I will ask you questions as much as I please, and you'll tell me what this mystery means, there's a dear old nurse! Have I not a right to know about my own relations?”
“Oh, bairn, bairn! If it were anything you'd like to hear, but why should you know what is all sad and gloomful? No, no, go to your balls, and think of your fine dresses and gran' partners, though, for the matter of that, it is but vanity of vanities—”
“Oh, if you're going to quote Ecclesiastes, I shall go!” said Rose, pouting. “I wish that book wasn't in the Bible! I'm sure such an old grumbler ought to have been in the Apocrypha.”
Elspeth shook her head, and muttered something about judgment and trouble. Rose began to be doubly curious.
“Trouble, sadness, a mystery—perhaps a tragedy! Rose had read of such things in books; were there such things actually in the family, and she had never known of them? A few hours ago and she had been unable to think of anything but her first ball, her new dress, her flowers; but she was seized now with the most intense desire to fathom this mystery. That it bid fair to be a sad mystery only made her more eager and curious. She was so young, so ignorant, there was still a halo of romance about those unknown things, trouble and sadness.
“Elspeth, you treat me like a child!” she exclaimed; “it's really too bad of you.”