And immediately they heard the desperate gallop at which John set off, to bring the doctor. The doctor--not Gilbert Allenders, but a respectable surgeon in the neighbourhood--returned with him without delay; and John took especial pains to inform him on the road, that Allenders was “as muckle himsel as I am,” when they parted. Poor Harry’s leg was broken again; he had sustained some severe internal injuries, and was terribly bruised over his whole frame. The surgeon remained all the night, and did everything it was possible to do, dispatching John to Stirling for assistance before the dawn. But when the grey still morning began to steal into the room, and Harry, faintly conscious, lay moaning on his bed, Agnes clasping her hands in sorrowful entreaty; and lifting up her pathetic eyes to the doctor’s face, asked if there was any hope. When she asked, she had scarcely any doubt there was. Danger, suffering, even positive agonies of endurance were before him, she saw; but Harry’s wife did not think he could die. “We have always hope so long as there is life,” said the doctor, turning his head away. And Agnes gasped and fell again. It was the warrant of death. “Will he die?” said Martha, crushing her hands together as she too looked, but with eyes that demanded an answer, in the doctor’s face. He waved his hand, and again turned away. The good man saw the mighty love which would detain and hold this parting soul, and he could not meet its despair. “Harry will die!”--no one said it; no one spoke those terrible words of doom; but it seemed to them all that the air was heavy with the sentence; and from Martha, who never wearied and never closed her eyes, ministering by his bedside within, to little Lettie crouching close to his door, and praying that God would take her--only take her, and save “my Harry;” there was not one among them who did not carry in their very face this great and terrible doom. Wiping the deadly dews from his brow, administering to him the almost hourly opiates, which no hand in the house, except her own, not even the surgeon’s, was steady enough to prepare, Martha watched by him night and day. Harry was seldom conscious, seldom able to recognize, or address his nurse; but in his broken ravings were things that touched her to the heart; things of the pure youth--the household life; nothing--they all thanked God for the especial mercy--nothing mingling with these innocent remembrances, of his times of secret sin. CHAPTER XII. “Fond dreaming hearts!--an old man and a child!” “MISS LETTIE, the auld man’s ta’en an ill turn. He cries for you to gang and tell him how the maister is--will ye gang to the loft and speak to the auld man, Miss Lettie?” Violet left her place at Harry’s door, and went.