“Life at five-and-twenty is always worth keeping. Take my advice, Mr. Thorburn, and ask advice from the fisher-folk before you set out on your walk.” “Thanks; you are very good; I will take your advice. And M. de Bergerac and his daughter are to dine at the Killalochie Inn, where I am pledged to rejoin my uncle to-day. I did not think I should see them again before I left Scotland.” After this, Eustace Thorburn bade Mr. Jerningham good morning, and departed in the direction of that rough flight of steps known as “The Devil’s Staircase.” Harold Jerningham tied his horse’s bridle to one of the marble columns, and paced to and fro upon the short grass, darkly meditative. “What does it mean?” he asked himself, “this young man’s appearance at this spot--his searching inquiries about the people who occupied Pendarvoch’s house four-and-twenty years ago? The very time! A spot so remote, so rarely visited--a house so seldom inhabited! Can he be any relation of--_hers_? A nephew, perhaps. And yet, is that likely? Her father and mother died more than twenty years ago. Who should have set this man upon the track? And he gathered those wild flowers, and put them in his breast, with the air of a man whose associations with the spot were of the closest and most tender. And in Berkshire I came upon him reading _that_ book--that wretched record of heartlessness and folly. Yes, it is the spot. When I last stood here I was young and beloved. I, who now hang upon the looks of a girl less lovely than she who gave me a kind of worship. Nothing that I possess, nothing that I can do, will win me such a love as that I spurned. O God! the bitterness of late remorse! I let her go, broken-hearted, and I know not how long she lived or how she died. I cannot think a creature so tender could long survive sorrow and ignominy, such as I made her suffer. Here we have sat side by side, and I have grown weary of her company. If she could arise before me now--pale, faded, in rags--I would fall upon my knees before her, and claim her as my redeeming angel. ‘Welcome back, sweet spirit!’ I would cry. ‘In all these years I have sought for happiness, and found none so pure and perfect as that you offered me. In all these years I have sought the love of women, and have never been loved as you loved me.’” Alas! that the dead cannot return! To her whose fate had been so dreary, what warm welcome, what atoning tears, might have been given if she could have come to claim them! A cold gust of wind swept along the cliff as Mr. Jerningham invoked the departed spirit. It seemed to him like a breath from the grave. “She is dead,” he said to himself; “I call her in vain.”