'A sudden flush crossed her cheek, her dark eyes sparkled with somewhat of their former beauty, and clasping the hands of her youngest sister, she exclaimed—
'"He comes, Jeanie! I hear his horse; but, oh, it is far off yet!" Then, closing her eyes, she almost swooned. Yet the Earl and his pale daughters heard nothing, for at that moment Tushielaw was fully three miles distant, galloping along the highway that wound by hill and wood, and feeling his heart expand with anxiety and joy as he saw fair Teviotdale, with all its pastoral beauties, deepening in the summer sun.
'After landing at Eskmouth from a ship of the States-General, Tushielaw, still suffering from his wound received at Mannheim, became suddenly oppressed by one of those gloomy presentiments of approaching evil, which at times come unbidden to the Scottish mind, and so mysteriously affect it. He endeavoured to shake off this solemn oppression, but in vain. An uncontrollable conviction of the necessity of reaching home without delay made him ride fast and furiously; and thus, without presenting himself at the capital to thank the servile placeman who had recalled him, he crossed the Lammermuirs and rode straight towards Peebles, which he entered about sunset.
'A half-stifled exclamation of joy burst from Isabel Douglas when his tall figure, with cloak and plume, was seen to ride up the street at a rapid pace towards her father's house. Full of his own thoughts, and haunted by that presentiment of coming sorrow—all unaware that Isabel was in the town, or, if he saw her, all unprepared for the sad change in her appearance, the war-worn cavalier rode rapidly past, without seeming once to lift his eye to the stone balcony, where the poor trembling girl cast her hollow eyes and thin, wan hands towards him in an agony of joy that could never find utterance in words.
'Poor Isabel! Alas! though his soul was full of her image, Adam Scott beheld her not, and spurred out of sight without according a word, a glance, a smile of recognition! And this was the hour, the time, the meeting to which she had so long looked forward during the age of separation that had passed!
'Isabel gazed after his retiring figure in silence and speechless sorrow; and then, crushed by the sudden shock of his apparent heedlessness, she exclaimed, that in France he had forgotten her, and murmuring the legend on her ring, she threw up her white hands wildly towards heaven—there was a gush of blood from her lips, and she expired in the arms of the Earl and her sisters before they could bear her in from the balcony.
'She was interred among her ancestors in the burial vault of the ducal house of Queensberry, and a plate on her coffin—a plate to which her sorrowing lover pressed his lips again and again—bore the simple legend—
'The eye finds;
The heart chooseth;
The hand binds;
But death looseth!' *
and since then,' concluded Dundrennan, 'we have heard no more of our comrade, who, though at home in beautiful Ettrick forest, would, I doubt not, willingly be with us to-night; for the tower of Tushielaw, with the brawl of Rankleburn, and the sough of the old oaks that shade it, must be but a lonely place wherein to brood over the loss of a heart we have loved.'
* A copper plate, bearing this inscription, was recently found in a grave in Inveresk churchyard.