"Let me hear no more of the matter," said her brother, turning away, "I wish it, and besides, I have my sermon to write."

But when the maiden aunt knocked at the door and entered with Elspeth's breakfast, she was astonished to find the girl sitting by the window dressed exactly as she had been on the previous evening. Her face was very pale, but her lips were compressed and her eyes dry.

"Elspeth," she said uncertainly, her woman's intuition in a moment detecting that which a man might not have discovered at all, "you have not had off your clothes all night. You have never been to bed!"

"No, Aunt Mary!"

"But what will the Doctor say—think of your father——"

"I do not care what he will say. Let him come and compel me if he can. He can thrash me as he does Frank."

"But—oh, Elspeth—Elspeth, dear," the old lady trembled so much that she just managed to lay the tray down on the untouched bed opposite the window, "what will God say?"

"'Like as a father pitieth his children,' isn't that what it says?" The words came out of the depths of the bitterness of that young heart, "well, if that be true, God will say nothing; for if He is like my father, He will not care!"

The old lady sat down on an old rocking-chair which Elspeth liked to keep in the window to sit in and read, half because it had been her mother's, and half (for Elspeth was not usually a sentimental young woman) because it was comfortable.

She put her hands to her face and sobbed into them. Then for the first time Elspeth looked at her. Hitherto she had been staring straight out at the window. So she had seen the day pass and the night come. So she had seen and not seen, heard and not heard the shadow of night sweep across the broad river, the stars come out, the cue owls mew as they flashed past silent as insects on the wing, and last of all, the rooks clamour upwards from the tall trees at break of day.