The recent visits of Captain Colville and Sir Redmond Sleath, on the one hand, and the cold and haughty demeanour of Lady Dunkeld and her daughter, on the other, had begun to impress upon her the necessity for making a change in their little household, and having some pleasant, motherly, and elderly lady to reside with them as a chaperone; and her mind was full of thought on this matter when Dr. Wodrow was announced. She welcomed him with pleasure, as usual, all unaware that he was the bearer of tidings that would render all her plans for the future unavailing! He noticed the cloud on Mary's face through her smile of welcome, and, taking her hand kindly in his own, he said, 'Mary dear, is there anything you particularly dread?' 'How strange that you should ask me this,' replied Mary, 'for I am rather ashamed to say that I feel as if something of evil were about to happen--but the emotion is vague and undefined.' 'Then you believe in presentiments?' 'I do--sometimes--do not you, Dr. Wodrow?' 'I am afraid I do,' said he, with increasing kindness and gravity of manner. 'So Robert and Ellinor have completely quarrelled?' 'I fear so.' 'George Eliot says that "Every man who is not a monster, a mathematician, or a moral philosopher is the slave of some woman or other." But I came not to speak of Robert, poor fellow, but of something concerning yourself.' 'Of me!' said Mary, startled by the growing gravity of his manner. 'Yourself and Ellinor! I have wanted much to see you all day, my dear.' 'Why?' 'I have news for you.' 'Good news or bad?' 'Bad, I grieve to say, my dear bairn,' said he, as he paused again with something pitiful in his handsome old face, while Mary's colour changed, and her heart began to beat quicker with pain and apprehension. 'Have you had a letter from a Mr. Luke Sharpe?' 'No--who is he?' 'A lawyer--a writer to the signet in Edinburgh--who is the legal agent of your cousin Wellwood.' 'What is all this to me--to us?' 'Your uncle is dead. Your cousin is the next male heir--heir of entail--so Birkwoodbrae, and everything else of which your uncle died possessed that is entailed, goes to him, and you and Ellinor can reside here no longer--so Mr. Sharpe has written me.' He evidently said this with an effort--with manifest difficulty, and as if he dreaded to look in the face of Mary, who for some moments felt as if stunned, and gazed at the lawyer's letter, which he placed before her, as she would at a serpent, and scarcely taking in its meaning. 'Understand me, child. Your father's elder brother, who permitted you to live unmolested here--as Birkwoodbrae was but a moiety of the entailed property--is dead, and young Wellwood, the guardsman of whom Captain Colville spoke so often, claims all.' 'And we must go away?' said Mary, in a low, strange, wailing voice, all unlike her own. 'Away--yes--but where?' 'God only knows!'