She thought that she had wrought Lennard a great wrong by winning his love for herself, and she was now burning with impatience to turn her back on the shores of Britain and find a new home in India; and there, by staff or other employments and allowances, Lennard knew that he could gain more than the yearly sum his father so mortifyingly offered him. Flora wept much over it all, we say, and her appetite became impaired; but she did not--like the heroine of a three-volume novel--starve herself into a fright. But a short time before she had been a childish and simple maiden--one sorely tried, however, and crushed by evil fortune; but with Lennard Melfort now, 'the prince had come into her existence and awakened her soul, and she was a woman--innocent still--but yet a woman.' The scenery of the Mearns looked inexpressibly lovely in the purity and richness of its verdure and varied artistic views, for the woods were profusely tinted with gold, russet brown, and red, when Lennard Melfort turned his back upon it and his native home for ever! The birds were chirping blithly, and the voice of the corncraik, with 'The sweet strain that the corn-reapers sang,' came on the evening breeze together. The old kirk bell was tolling in the distance, and its familiar sound spoke to Lennard's heart of home like that of an old friend. The river was rolling under its great arch of some eighty feet in span, the downward reflection of the latter in the water making a complete circle like a giant O. The old castle of Halgreen, with its loopholed battlements of the fourteenth century, stood blackly and boldly upon its wave-beaten eminence, and the blue smoke of picturesque Gourdon, a fisher village, curled up on the ambient air, as the scenery faded out in the distance. Flora became marvellously cheerful when their journey fairly began, and laughingly she sung in Lennard's ear-- 'The world goes up and the world goes down, But _yesterday's_ smile and _yesterday's_ frown Can never come back again, sweet friend-- Can never come back again!' Means were not forgotten to support nurse Madelon in her native place, where we shall leave her till she reappears in our narrative again. So Lennard and his girl-wife sailed for India, full of love for each other and hope for their own lonely and unaided future, and both passed for ever out of the lives and apparently out of the memory of the family at Craigengowan. Times there were when he hoped to distinguish himself, so that the circle there--those who had renounced him--would be proud of him; but in seeking that distinction rashly, he might throw away his life, and thus leave his little Flora penniless on the mercy of a cold world and a proverbially ungrateful Government.