'As children--as boy and girl, they may have quarrelled, Mary; but this affair will be a serious one for both, for Robert especially. His studies are neglected, his appetite is gone, and he looks the ghost of himself.' Mary knew not what more to urge, as she had seen, with some anxiety, Sir Redmond's admiration of her sister, and said, after a pause, 'I wonder what manner of man Sir Redmond is?' 'Judging by the little I saw of him at the garden-party--where the mischief seems to have been done--not a good man, Mary dear--not a good man, though a handsome one in his way, and to a young girl, I doubt not, fascinating. Yet I would rather see my daughter dead, if I had one, than married to a man with eyes so cold, so cruel and shifty.' 'But _who_ is thinking of marriage?' said Mary, with a slight laugh, little knowing that it was a contingency as remote from the thoughts of Sir Redmond as her own. 'And I don't think that Captain Colville--for all that Dr. Wodrow seems to like him so much--can be good in every way if he has such a friend or companion as Sir Redmond Sleath,' said the old lady, shaking her head. These provoking words haunted Mary for weeks after, as the tormenting fragment of a song or air will haunt us--not because we like it, though it will recur again and again. Then he had gone without the formality of a farewell visit. Had the Dunkeld ladies aught to do with that? Mary's heart foreboded that they had. Mrs. Wodrow was full of indignation at the worry and humiliation undergone by her son, and even the doctor was not disinclined to inveigh against garden-parties and such-like gatherings, as his ancestor did against theatres--'those seminaries of idleness, looseness, and sin,' as he termed them in _Analecta Scotica_. The peaceful current of the sisters' life--the life they led at bonnie Birkwoodbrae, was soon to be roughly disturbed now, and events were to occur which they could never have foreseen. CHAPTER XIII. THE LAST APPEAL. Robert Wodrow, on the afternoon referred to in our last chapter, was, we have said, engaged elsewhere than at the manse, and yet he was not very far away. Incidents trivial at the time had now recurred with convincing and accumulating force to his feverish mind on one hand; on the other, he feared that he might have been too hasty in his condemnation, and too summary in his suspicions, in quitting the party at Craigmhor as he had done; yet where were these two all the time he had missed them, and what was the subject of their discourse while he had been lingering amid the gay groups in the sunshine, and was grotesquely tortured by the music of the band? And the token he had prayed for had not been accorded! How he loathed the little world in which he lived; how he longed to eschew everyone there, and get far away from the Birks of Invermay, for to see Ellinor among these with another, and that other 'the slimy Sleath,' as he thought, would drive him mad.