'Good news or bad?'
'Bad, I grieve to say, my dear bairn,' said he, as he paused again with something pitiful in his handsome old face, while Mary's colour changed, and her heart began to beat quicker with pain and apprehension.
'Have you had a letter from a Mr. Luke Sharpe?'
'No—who is he?'
'A lawyer—a writer to the signet in Edinburgh—who is the legal agent of your cousin Wellwood.'
'What is all this to me—to us?'
'Your uncle is dead. Your cousin is the next male heir—heir of entail—so Birkwoodbrae, and everything else of which your uncle died possessed that is entailed, goes to him, and you and Ellinor can reside here no longer—so Mr. Sharpe has written me.'
He evidently said this with an effort—with manifest difficulty, and as if he dreaded to look in the face of Mary, who for some moments felt as if stunned, and gazed at the lawyer's letter, which he placed before her, as she would at a serpent, and scarcely taking in its meaning.
'Understand me, child. Your father's elder brother, who permitted you to live unmolested here—as Birkwoodbrae was but a moiety of the entailed property—is dead, and young Wellwood, the guardsman of whom Captain Colville spoke so often, claims all.'
'And we must go away?' said Mary, in a low, strange, wailing voice, all unlike her own.