'Poor Colewort!' cried Julia, with just a thrill of viciousness in her voice, 'there go his hopes of a prize at the flower show next week! I know he has been nursing that rose for weeks past. For all that, Miss Brown, they will go nicely with your black gown, so I shall leave you now to embellish yourself with the poor man's broken hopes--Pathetic sentiment that? Ha! ha!' CHAPTER XIII. _A HARBOUR OF REFUGE_. Roderick having bestowed his companion safely in the shieling of Stephen Boague, did not linger. He started at once down the glen by the path beaten by the shepherd and his family. Down a glen, over a mountain shoulder, across rolling upland, zig-zagging between marsh and peat bog, at length coming out on the road, and in course of time gaining the inn from which they had started in the forenoon. There was no lifting or clearing away of the mist, it had thickened rather, and filled the air with a diffused drizzling spray, which settled drenchingly on every thing, trickling down rock and herbage, soaking into clothing and ground, till like sponge, they were distended with moisture. He was wet already, as well as more or less bruised, battered, and foot-sore from his late experience, therefore the drizzle did not add materially to his discomfort, besides, the ferment in his mind made him insensible to bodily pains. He had heard from Mrs. Sangster's own lips when apparent danger had momentarily removed the restraints of civilized life, and her native egotistic worldliness and greed for once spoke out for themselves, that she was contemplating a match between Sophia and Wallowby. His Sophia, for whom like another Jacob earning his Rachel, he had laboured and borne so long. He had not gone out each morning for fourteen years, it is true, driving the cattle before him on the pastures of Auchlippie; but these are not the days in which human life is measured by centuries. Out of what the insurance companies would call his presumption of life, he had bestowed a far larger percentage on Sophia, than were the fourteen years devoted by the patriarch to winning his bride, not to mention difference in intensity. Notwithstanding the beauty of the sacred episode, one cannot but suspect some coolness, along with the much patience required to watch the beloved object drifting from the bright bloom of girlhood into the sun-burnt maturity of thirty summers, and still keep waiting to work out the bargain. Roderick had been working out his bridal on the other line, not ministering to the greed of a grasping father-in-law, but submitting to whims, exactions, and pretensions innumerable from the coarse-fibred mother of his charmer. How she had taken upon her to regulate his orthodoxy!--had sat in judgment on all that he did! reproved and exhorted him! and how he had borne it all, and attributed it to ignorant good intentions, for the love of Sophia! Sophia, whom he had picked blaeberries for in