And Harry’s name and remembrance lives--strangely exists and acts in the country in which Harry himself was little more than a subject for gossip. To hear him spoken of now, you would rather think of some mysterious unseen person, carrying on a great work by means of agents, that his chosen privacy and retirement may be kept sacred, than of one dead to all the business and labour of this world; and there is a certain mystery and awe about the very house where Harry’s intentions reign supreme, to be considered before everything else. So strong is this feeling, that sometimes an ignorant mind conceives the idea that he lives there yet in perpetual secrecy, and by and bye will re-appear to reap the fruit of all these labours; and Geordie Paxton shakes his head solemnly, and tells his neighbours what the “auld man” says--that Allenders cannot rest in his grave till this work he began is accomplished; and people speak of Harry as an active, existing spirit--never as the dead. It is more than a year now since Rose’s marriage, and not far from five since Harry’s death, and there is a full family circle round the drawing-room fireside, where Mrs. Charteris has been administering a lively little sermon to Lettie about the extravagance of destroying certain strips of French cambric; (“It would have cost five-and-twenty shillings a yard in my young days,” says the old lady), with which Lettie has been devising some piece of ornamental work for the adornment of Agnes. But Lettie’s execution never comes up to her ideal, and the cambric is destroyed for ever; though Katie Calder, looking on, has made one or two suggestions which might have saved it. “For you see, my dear, this is _waste_,” said Mrs. Charteris; “and ye should have tried it on paper first, before you touched the cambric.” “So I did,” said Lettie, nervously; “but it went all wrong.” And Rose smiles at the childish answer; and Mrs. Charteris bids Violet sit erect, and keep up her head. Agnes is preparing tea at the table. Martha, with little Sandy kneeling on the rug before her, playing with a box of toys which he places in her lap, sits quietly without her work, in honour of the family party; and Uncle Sandy is telling Katie Calder all kinds of news about her companions in Ayr. Why is Lettie nervous? Cuthbert at the table is looking over a new magazine, which has just been brought in from Stirling with a supply of other books ordered by their good brother; and constant longing glances to this magazine have had some share in the destruction of Lettie’s cambric. But Lettie is sixteen now, and Agnes thinks she should not be such a child. “Here is something for you,” says Cuthbert, suddenly. “Listen, we have got a poet among us. I will read you the ballad of the ‘Lady’s Well.’”