“Twenty years ago!” she cried, with a start, “twenty years?” Then she raised her voice suddenly and cried, “Gilchrist!” She was very pale, and her excitement great, her eyes gleaming, her nerves quivering. She paid no attention to the little lawyer, who on his side observed her so closely. “Gilchrist,” she said, when the maid came in hurriedly from the inner room in which she had been, “we have often wondered why there was no sign of him when I came into my fortune. The reason is he was dead before my uncle died.” “Dead?” said Gilchrist, and put up at once her apron to her eyes, “dead? Oh, mem, that bonnie young man!” “Yes,” said Miss Bethune. She rose up and began to move about the room in great excitement. “Yes, he would still be a bonnie young man then--oh, a bonnie young man, as his son is now. I wondered how it was he made no sign. Before, it was natural: but when my uncle was dead--when I had come into my fortune! That explains it--that explains it all. He was dead before the day he had reckoned on came.” “Oh, dinna say that, now!” cried Gilchrist. “How can we tell if it was the day he had reckoned on? Why might it no’ be your comfort he was aye thinking of--that you might lose nothing, that your uncle might keep his faith in you, that your fortune might be safe?” “Ay, that my fortune might be safe, that was the one thing. What did it matter about me? Only a woman that was so silly as to believe in him--and believed in him, God help me, long after he had proved what he was. Gilchrist, go down on your knees and thank God that he did not live to cheat us more, to come when you and me made sure he would come, and fleece us with his fair face and his fair ways, till he had got what he wanted,--the filthy money which was the end of all.” “Oh, mem,” cried Gilchrist, again weeping, “dinna say that now. Even if it were true, which the Lord forbid, dinna say it now!” But her mistress was not to be controlled. The stream of recollection, of pent-up feeling, the brooding of a lifetime, set free by this sudden discovery of her story, which was like the breaking down of a dyke to a river, rushed forth like that river in flood. “I have thought many a time,” she cried,--“when my heart was sick of the silence, when I still trembled that he would come, and wished he would come for all that I knew, like a fool woman that I am, as all women are,--that maybe his not coming was a sign of grace, that he had maybe forgotten, maybe been untrue; but that it was not at least the money, the money and nothing more. To know that I had that accursed siller and not to come for it was a sign of grace. I was a kind of glad. But it was not that!” she cried, pacing to and fro like a wild creature,--“it was not that! He would have come, oh, and explained everything, made everything clear, and told me to my face it was for my sake!--if it had not been that death stepped in and disappointed him as he had disappointed me!”