'Ellinor and I will never stoop so low,' replied Mary, alternately interlacing her fingers in her lap, and mechanically caressing the head of Jack, who had placed his nose on her knee, and regarded her wistfully with his great black eyes, as if he knew instinctively that something distressed his mistress by the expression of her face. 'Well, what will be, will be!' said Dr. Wodrow, from his fatalist or Presbyterian point of view, as he cast his eye upward to the ceiling. Mary heard his voice as one hears in a dream. The flies buzzed in the window curtains, the last of the birds still twittered about among the climbing creepers at the open sash, the roses sent forth their fragrance still, and the drooping foliage of the silver birches was gently stirred by the soft evening breeze. The old clock ticked loudly on the mantelpiece--unnaturally so--as Mary thought it seemed to do 'when mamma and papa died;' but when the minister urged again that she should attempt to temporise, 'No,' she exclaimed, emphatically, 'we shall not accept a farthing or a farthing's worth of what belonged to our common ancestors. It would ill become Colonel Wellwood's daughters to do so now.' 'Lady Dunkeld, I doubt not, has great influence with your cousin Wellwood.' 'She knows him, then?' 'Yes; people in "Society," as it is called, all know something of each other.' 'And you would have me seek his interest through her? Enough of this, dear Dr. Wodrow. I think you should know me better,' said Mary, covering her eyes with white and tremulous fingers, as if she would thrust back her tears. 'The recognition of the inevitable in human affairs often brings composure when all else fails, we read somewhere,' said the minister. 'Whatever _is_, is doubtless best, and this apparent stroke of evil fortune may--nay, must be so,' said Mary; 'yet it is hard to bear just now--hard to bear.' Dr. Wodrow regarded her bowed head with a soft, kind, and admiring smile. 'All will come right in the end, dear Mary,' said he, confidently, and then added, almost laughingly, 'I am sure Captain Colville's advice may prevail with you; and he will be back before I can return from Edinburgh, whither I must go on the morrow morning early. Mary's pallor increased at the mention of Captain Colville's name; but she said, firmly and doggedly, 'He is the last man in the world whose advice I would seek.' But before the well-meaning old minister came back from his journey the crisis in the sisters' affairs seemed ended and over. At last he was gone, and Mary sat for a time in the twilighted old dining-room as one who was stunned or in a dream, while the beloved and reverend figures of her dead parents seemed once again to occupy in fancy their favourite places by the hearth.