"A' the better, bairn—a' the better."
"But I may never see him mair!"
"A' the better still, bairn."
"Oh, mother dear," urged the weeping girl, "dinna say sae; ye'll rive my puir heart in twain amang ye. And this Fronde, and these Frondeurs, what is it, what are they?"
"What would it be but some Papist devilry, or a Calderwood wadna be in the middle o't?" was the angry response.
Poor Annora knew not what to think, for there were no newspapers in those days, and rumours of events in distant lands came vaguely by chance travellers, and at long intervals. Lothian and Fife were almost farther apart in those days than Scotland and France are now, in the matters of news and travel.
She felt like Juliet in the feud between the families—
"Tis but thy name that is my enemy;—
Though art thyself though, not a Montague.
What's Montague? It is not hand or foot,
Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part
Belonging to a man. O, be some other name!
What's in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.
——Doff thy name;
And for that name, which is no part of thee,
Take all myself.
Even as water dropping on a granite rock will wear that rock away in course of time, so, by the systematic tyranny of her parents, and by their reiterated assurances, and even forged proofs, that Willie Calderwood had fallen, sword in hand, at the battle of the Barricades, was Annora worn and wearied into a state of acquiescence, in which she accepted Mr. Elijah Howler as her husband.
This was the climax of years of a gloomy, sabbatical life, during which the Judaical rigidity of religious observance made Sunday a periodical horror, and Seafield Tower a daily hell.