"Who has seen the White Lady, Mairi?" she asked patiently, and the girl grew a little calmer.
"I, with my own eyes, your ladyship," she declared. "It was at a turn of the passage not far from Mistress M'Kissock's room. And I did not run from it, moreover. I stood and watched till it disappeared, for I was afraid to move. And Mistress M'Kissock will say that it is all havers and nonsense, but I am sure. For it was seen in the woods as well, on the way to the hut that was Lord St. Just's, and Donuil Mohr, the forester, it was who saw it there."
Sallie sighed. She did not know what to think of it all, she who had so much else to think about. But she comforted the distressed Mairi, and presently sent her off on her errand, dry-eyed at last, and with word for the other servants that her ladyship was not in the least afraid of any such shadow seen in the dusk.
Sallie had almost forgotten the matter, indeed, before Ambrizette—much exercised in her mind by her beloved mistress's very evident and unusual preoccupation—had finished brushing out her beautiful hair and heaped it about her bent head in a heavy red-gold crown. When her toilette was quite complete, she looked wistfully round the luxurious rooms in which she had dreamed such happy dreams, and then went quietly through, a tall, slender, white-robed figure herself in the firelight, to one of the windows that look down Loch Jura and out to sea. She stopped there, and stayed for a time gazing out at the silver sheen of the ripple among which the Small Isles were set. The snow had ceased for the moment, but it looked as if there were more to come.
She looked directly downward, at the quiet village below. There was only a single light visible, and that at the inn. It was suddenly extinguished and Sallie turned away from the window.
"I wonder—I think he will come," she told herself, if a little doubtfully, as she passed through her boudoir again on her way to rejoin her guests; she paused for an instant to throw two warm, white arms about Ambrizette watching her as she went, out of dog-like eyes with a world of dumb devotion in them.
"I think he will come," she encouraged herself as she entered the distant drawing-room. "He promised—
"Oh, Mr. Herries!"
She had stopped, a little startled, at sight of the solitary figure before the fire. But it was none other than the old factor, a very cadaverous spectacle in evening clothes much too ample for one so emaciated, who came forward with a hasty apology for his intrusion.
"I'm quite well again now," he assured her, in reply to her anxious questions, "and—I thought I would risk taking the liberty—if you will grant me permission to sit at table with you to-night. I always had that privilege with the earl."