I cannot explain more than the words themselves do how this high soul in homely guise felt the pang of her oft-repeated disappointment. Children and grandchildren, she had fed them not with common food, the bread earned with ordinary labours, but with her blood, like the pelican; with the toil of man and woman, of ploughman and hero, all mingled into one. High heart, heroic in her weakness as in her strength! They had turned out but “common folk,” and, at each successive failure, that pang had gone through and through her which common folk could not comprehend. She looked at Willie the last, with a mingled pleasure and anguish in her dying mind--I say pleasure, and not joy, for the signs of his face were not such as to give that last benediction of happiness. Nature was glad in her to see the boy back whom she had long believed at the bottom of the sea; but her dying eyes looked at him wistfully, trying to penetrate his heart, and reach its excuses. “You should have written, to ease our minds,” she said gently. “How was I to know you would take it to heart so? Many a man has stayed away longer, and no harm come of it,” cried Willie, self-defending. The old woman put her hand upon his bended head, as he sat by her bedside, half sullen, half sorry. She stroked his thick curling locks softly, saying nothing for a few long silent moments. She did not blame him further, nor justify him, but simply was silent. Then she said, “You will take care of your sister, Willie, as I have taken care of her? She has suffered a great deal for you.” “But oh!” cried Jeanie, when they were alone together--kneeling by the bedside, with her face upon her grandmother’s hand, “you never called him but Willie--you never spoke to him soft and kind, as you used to do.” “Was I no kind?” said the dying woman, with a mingled smile and sigh; but she kept “My bonnie man!” her one expression of homely fondness, for Edgar’s ear alone. They had more than one long conversation before her end came. Edgar was always glad to volunteer to relieve the watchers in her room, feeling infinitely more at home there than with the others below. On the night before her death, she told him of the arrangements she had made. “You gave me your fortune, Edgar, ower rashly, my bonnie man. Your deed was so worded, they tell me, that I might have willed your siller away from you, had I no been an honest woman.” “And so I meant,” said Edgar, though he was not very clear that at the time he had any meaning at all. “And there is Jeanie----”