But the dinner past, and still Harry kept Gilbert steadily at a distance. They could not sufficiently admire his strength and resolution, and how bravely he resisted the tempter. Gilbert himself seemed slightly surprised and baffled; and not a single disconcerted glance was lost on the rejoicing Agnes, with whom there was only a single step between the greatest alarm for Harry’s stability, and the greatest pride and confidence in it. But when the evening was considerably advanced, and they had all assembled in the drawing-room, Harry began to talk of what they had seen and heard in Stirling. “Who do you think I met, Martha?” said the unthinking Harry. “Dick Buchanan, my old plague in Glasgow; and what do you think he told me?--I scarcely can believe it--that our friend Charteris was actually going to be married to his sister Clemie, a good-natured clumsy girl, whom I used to see going to school. I could not have expected such a thing of Charteris.” And as Harry’s eye rested on Rose, he stopped suddenly, his face flushing all over with the deepest colour; yet Rose displayed no motion. A slight start, a momentary paleness, and then she put out her hand as if to grasp at something, drawing it back by and bye with an unconscious motion of imagination, as if her prop had pained her--though she did not say a word. But her head grew giddy, and the light swam in her darkening eyes; and constantly in her mind was this impulse to take hold of something to keep herself from falling. When Gilbert took reluctant leave, and she rose to bid him good-night, her hand clutched at the back of an empty chair; and when she went to rest, with a ringing in her ears and a dimness before her eyes, Rose held by the wall on her way to her own chamber--not to support herself, though even her form tottered, but to support her heart, which tottered more. She did not think, nor ask, nor question anything; she was too much occupied in this same immediate necessity of holding herself up, and propping her stricken strength. “I believe I am a fool,” said Harry, suddenly, when Rose withdrew; “I never thought--Charteris was here so short a time the other day, and it is so long since he came before--I never thought of Rose; but she took it very quietly, Martha. Is she interested, do you think? Will she feel it? I am sure, for my own part, I always believed that Charteris liked Rose, and I cannot tell what made me so foolish to-night.” “Perhaps it was very well,” said Martha; “it must have been told, and the manner of telling it is a small matter; but Rose, as you say, took it very quietly. I dare say she will not care about it, Harry.” Martha knew better--but she thought it well to pass over the new grief lightly, since it was a grief which could not bear either sympathy or consolation.