“Ay,” said Lauderdale, “I can say nothing against that argument. I’m no denying it’s the last and the greatest. I speak the voice of a man’s yearning--but I’ve no intention of contravening the truth. He’s gone like many a one before him. You and me must bide our time. I’ll say no more of Arthur. The best thing you can do is to read a chapter. If we canna hear of him direct, which is no to be hoped for, we can take as good a grip as possible of the Friend that stands between us. It’s little use trying to forget--or trying no to think and inquire and question. There is but one thing in the world, so far as I can see, that a man can feel a kind of sure of. Callant, read a chapter,” said Lauderdale, with a long sigh. He threw himself back, as he spoke, in the nearest chair, and Colin took his Bible dutifully to obey. The contrast between this request, expressed as any Scotch peasant would have expressed it, and the speculations which preceded it, did not startle Colin, and he had opened the book by instinct in the latter part of St. John’s Gospel, when he was disturbed by the entrance of Alice, who came in softly from her room without any warning. Her long attendance on her brother had withdrawn the colour from her cheeks and the fulness from her figure so gradually, that it was only now in her mourning dress that her companions saw how pale and thin she had grown. Alice was not speculative, nor fanciful, nor addicted to undue exercise of the faculties of her own mind in any way. She was a dutiful woman, young and simple, and accepted God’s will without inquiry or remonstrance. Though she had struggled long against the thought of Arthur’s death, now that he _was_ dead she recognized and submitted to the event which it was no longer possible to avert or change, with a tender and sweet resignation of which some women are capable. A more forlorn and desolate creature than Alice Meredith did not exist on the earth, to all ordinary appearance, at this moment; but, as she was not at all thinking of herself, that aspect of the case did not occur to her.