Miss Bethune gave a low cry. It was inarticulate, but she could not restrain it. She put out both her hands, then drew them back again; and after he had gone away, she went on pacing up and down the room, making this involuntary movement, murmuring that outcry, which was not even a word, to herself. She put out her hands, sometimes her arms, then brought them back and pressed them to the heart which seemed to be bursting from her breast. “Oh, if it might still be that he were mine! Oh, if I might believe it (as I do--I do!) and take him to me whether or no!” Her thoughts shaped themselves as their self-repression gave way to that uncontrollable tide. “Oh, well might he say that it was not the common way! the woman that had been a mother to him, thinking no more of him the moment her own comes in! And might I be like that? If I took him to my heart, that I think must be mine, and then the other, the true one--that would know nothing of me! And he, what does he know of me?--what does he think of me?--an old fool that puts out my arms to him without rhyme or reason. But then it’s to me he comes when he’s in trouble; he comes to me, he leans his head on me, just by instinct, by nature. And nature cries out in me here.” She put her hands once more with unconscious dramatic action to her heart. “Nature cries out--nature cries out!” Unconsciously she said these words aloud, and herself startled by the sound of her own voice, looked up suddenly, to see Gilchrist, who had just come into the room, standing gazing at her with an expression of pity and condemnation which drove her mistress frantic. Miss Bethune coloured high. She stopped in a moment her agitated walk, and placed herself in a chair with an air of hauteur and loftiness difficult to describe. “Well,” she said, “were you wanting anything?” as if the excellent and respectable person standing before her had been, as Gilchrist herself said afterwards, “the scum of the earth". “No’ much, mem,” said Gilchrist; “only to know if you were"--poor Gilchrist was so frightened by her mistress’s aspect that she invented reasons which had no sound of truth in them--“going out this morning, or wanting your seam or the stocking you were knitting.” “Did you think I had all at once become doited, and did not know what I wanted?” asked Miss Bethune sternly. Gilchrist made no reply, but dropped her guilty head. “To think,” cried the lady, “that I cannot have a visitor in the morning--a common visitor like those that come and go about every idle person,--nor take a thought into my mind, nor say a word even to myself, but in comes an intrusive serving-woman to worm out of me, with her frightened looks and her peety and her compassion, what it’s all about! Lord! if it were any other than a woman that’s been about me twenty years, and had just got herself in to be a habit and a custom, that would dare to come with her soft looks peetying me!”