Two letters that Mary wrote to him had miscarried, and, as no answers came to them, with over-sensitiveness and doubt, she misconstrued the silence of her good old friend, and, believing that he resented Ellinor's treatment of his son, would now ignore their existence.
'I shall write no more,' said Mary. 'Can it be that Lady Dunkeld has ruined us among those who knew us? If so, there is one use in adversity—we can tell our friends from our enemies.'
So in sorrowful doubt she did not write again; seeking for employment and nursing Ellinor occupied all the thoughts of Mary, who became almost distracted with a fear that the former might be sent by Mrs. Fubsby to a common hospital. Nothing, perhaps, was further from the good woman's thoughts; but Mary had heard, or read, of such things. Thus, fully occupied, she wrote no more; and, as time went past, the mystery grew at the manse of Kirktoun-Mailler, and in the mind of Colville also. Everything painful, horrible, and disastrous was fancied, and advertisements put by the latter in the Times, however carefully yet pointedly worded, were never seen by Mary. So in these our days of penny post and cheap telegrams, they remained lost, untraced, and undiscovered by those who loved them best.
She had both confidence and patience; and patience is mental strength concentrated. Her religious education had also taught her resignation, and she felt that 'let the sands drop through the glass ever so slowly, there is a time when they end; there is a time for us all; no matter the hour, for God thinks it the best.'
Yet often as she sat, busy with crewel work for sale, by Ellinor's bedside, the notes of the passing bell in the cupola of the adjacent church—a toll unknown in Scotland—smote a gloom upon her heart with every measured stroke.
No pessimist was Mary Wellwood in temper or heart, and no manufacturer of artificial sorrow; yet the idea occurred to her with terror—what if she should lose Ellinor, and be left alone in this bitter world?
As petty trifles, like airs and scraps of frivolous songs, will haunt the mind in times of dire calamity, even of death, Mary's thoughts would run persistently on the feathered pets and flowers she had once at home—even on the sparrows for which she was daily wont to spread crumbs, where they would find none now; and she actually envied her old owl; he, at least, was at home in his ivied ruin, that looked down on Invermay.
Thinking thus, Mary would sit in the evening twilight by the open window, through which came the roar of mighty London; but not the flower-scented air that hovered over their lost home; and while the stars, dimly seen in the smoke-laden sky of London, stole into sight, she thought of the green Ochil peaks, over which the same stars were shining brightly, like vast diamonds set in azure.
Ellinor recovered and gained strength, but still able to do little with her pencil.
Evening walks, as among the green lanes and shady paths in the glen where the May flows, they could have no more now. They seldom saw the sun set; and when evening fell the streets in their vicinity became filled by people whose appearance appalled them. There were vicious-looking men and more vicious-looking women from the adjacent Edgware Road; vendors of carrion on wooden skewers, known as 'cat's-meat;' vendors of roasted potatoes and chestnuts; boiled oranges; of plums, the bloom of which was due to clothes-blue; vendors of milk, the component parts of which made one shudder; of queerly-painted pugs and yellow-painted sparrows; of red pots of earth, with rootless twigs of flowers stuck in them—another London dodge—yet declared by the vendors to be 'all a-growing—all a-blowing.'