She had a fair, sweet old face, with a resemblance to Abelard, Edith thought, when at the sound of their footsteps she looked up with a smile of welcome and inquiry. From having always lived near the border she spoke with a broad Scotch accent, which Edith did not comprehend at first. She was evidently greatly pleased and flattered that Col. Schuyler had come to see her again, and brought his bonny bride, whose hand she held in her own, and into whose face she gazed curiously as she bade her welcome, and led her into the house where Mrs. Nesbit, the daughter, sat with her sleeves rolled up combing her long black hair, with a bit of glass before her, and Godfrey Schuyler asleep in his rude cradle. Mrs. Nesbit, or Jenny as she was called, was not naturally as refined as her mother, and she kept on combing her hair without any apology, talking rapidly all the time, and saying what an honor she felt it to be for the likes of Col. Schuyler to visit the likes of them, though to be sure he owed them something for her poor brother’s death. “You know about that, I s’pose,” and she looked at Edith, whose dress she had been closely inspecting between each passage of the comb through her hair. Edith nodded in token that she did know. She could not speak; the room was so small and so close, and the iron fingers held her throat with so firm a clutch that she could only sit perfectly still and listen while the old story was told again by Colonel Schuyler, and the mother wept silently, ejaculating now and then, “Oh, my puir bairn, my puir bairn!” Jenny did not cry. She was looking at the bride in her rich apparel, and thinking how proud she was to be so unmoved, as if it was nothing to her how many poor men lost their lives to save that of a Schuyler. And Colonel Schuyler too had similar thoughts with Jenny, and believed it was contempt for these people and their surroundings which kept Edith so silent, in spite of his efforts to draw her into the conversation and make her seem gracious and interested. Alas! he could not guess what she was enduring as she sat there in Abelard’s home, and heard them talking of him and all the incidents concerned with his death. “You dinna ken my lad,” the mother said to her; “an’ so you dinna ken how sair I was for him. Ah, he was a bonny lad and gude.” Edith nodded, and the old lady went on, now addressing the colonel: “A maun who kenned my boy and see him kilt coomed here onc’t an’ tauld me about it, and said there was a young lass there who moight be Abel’s sweetheart; heard ye tell of her like?” No, the colonel had not heard of her, or he had forgotten, and as Edith was not supposed to know anything of the circumstances she was spared the questioning, and Mrs. Lyle went on to say that if there was such a lass she’d like so much to know something of her. “Mayhap,” and she turned again to Edith; “mayhap you’ll foind her some day, and if you do wool ye let me know?”