"My husband! my dear husband!" cried Mary, flinging her arms around his neck; "look on me—speak to me! All is well!"
He gazed on her face—he grasped her hand. "Mary—my injured Mary!" he exclaimed, convulsively, "can you forgive me—you—you? O God! I was once innocent! Forgive me, dearest!—for our child's sake, curse not its guilty father!"
"Husband!—Adam!" she cried, wringing his hand—"come with me, love, come—leave this horrid place—you have nothing to fear—your debt is paid."
"Paid!" he exclaimed, wildly. "Ha! ha! Paid!"
They were his last words. Convulsions came upon him; the film of death passed over his eyes, and his troubled spirit fled.
She clung round his neck—she yet cried, "Speak to me!"—she refused to believe that he was dead, and her reason seemed to have fled with his spirit.
She was taken from his body and conveyed home. The agony of grief subsided into a stupor approaching imbecility. She was unconscious of all around; and within three weeks from the death of her husband, the broken spirit of Mary Douglas found rest, and her father returned in sorrow with her helpless orphan to Teviotdale.
THE SCOTTISH VETERAN.
It was upon one of those clear, chill, but not unpleasant days, that so often occur towards the latter end of November, that an aged female, and one much younger, in all the bloom of maiden beauty, overcast by a tender shade of melancholy, that gave tenfold interest to her lovely countenance, and mellowed the lustre of her dark hazel eyes, were seen sitting at the door of a cottage on the banks of one of the tributaries of the silver Tweed. The full round orb of the sun was sinking slowly behind a huge bank of clouds, tinged by his departing rays, that lingered as if regretting his short career, and loth to depart. The deep shades of twilight closed quickly upon the scene; but the females sat engaged at their work, as if it had been an eve of autumn. Margaret Blair, the more aged of the two, sat gazing in one direction with unwearied assiduity, only occasionally looking at the progress she made at the stocking she was busy knitting; and Jeanie Aitken, the younger, bent her steadfast gaze at intervals in the same direction, towards the road that skirted the foot of the neighbouring hills. Heavy clouds began to rise in the east; the wind had changed towards that quarter, and howled mournfully along the waste.