"She bude to come hame, mem."
"Broke her legs!"
"Hoot, mem�-her k-nees. I dinna mean the banes, ye ken, mem; only the skin. But she wasna fit to gang on. And sae I brocht her back."
"What's that i' the cairt? Is't onything deid?"
"Na, mem, de'il a bit o' 't! It's livin' eneuch. It's a stranger lad that I gae a lift till upo' the road. He's fell tired."
But Dow's voice trembled, or�-or something or other revealed all to the mother's heart. She gave a great cry. Alec sprung from the cart, rushed into the house, and was in his mother's arms.
Annie was asleep in the next room, but she half awoke with a sense of his presence. She had heard his voice through the folds of sleep. And she thought she was lying on the rug before the dining-room fire, with Alec and his mother at the tea-table, as on that night when he brought her in from the snow-hut. Finding out confusedly that the supposition did not correspond with some other vague consciousness, she supposed next that she "had died in sleep and was a blessed ghost," just going to find Alec in heaven. That was abandoned in its turn, and all at once she knew that she was in her own bed, and that Alec and his mother were talking in the next room.
She rose, but could hardly dress herself for trembling. When she was dressed she sat down on the edge of the bed to bethink herself.
The joy was almost torture, but it had a certain qualifying bitter in it. Ever since she had believed him dead, Alec had been so near to her! She had loved him as much as ever she would. But Life had come in suddenly, and divided those whom Death had joined. Now he was a great way off; and she dared not speak to him whom she had cherished in her heart. Modesty took the telescope from the hands of Love, and turning it, put the larger end to Annie's eye. Ever since her confession to Curly, she had been making fresh discoveries in her own heart; and now the tide of her love swelled so strong that she felt it must break out in an agony of joy, and betray her if once she looked in the face of Alec alive from the dead. Nor was this all. What she had done about his mother's debt, must come out soon; and although Alec could not think that she meant to lay him under obligation, he might yet feel under obligation, and that she could not bear. These things and many more so worked in the sensitive maiden that as soon as she heard Alec and his mother go to the dining-room she put on her bonnet and cloak, stole like a thief through the house to the back door, and let herself out into the night.
She avoided the path, and went through the hedge into a field of stubble at the back of the house across which she made her way to the turnpike road and the new bridge over the Glamour. Often she turned to look back to the window of the room where he that had been dead was alive and talking with his widowed mother; and only when the intervening trees hid it from her sight did she begin to think what she should do. She could think of nothing but to go to her aunt once more, and ask her to take her in for a few days. So she walked on through the sleeping town.