Having dined, the party made haste to be gone, under pressure of the old lady's impatience; for of all the anxieties of that anxious day the most harassing to her now was that Roderick would come down and join them on the home-going. That would be dreadful, yet how was she to forbid him? He had come as her guest, and he had, in all probability, saved her life a few hours since on the hill. It needed advice and consideration to decide what she should do or say at their next meeting, in view of the dreadful revelations of his depravity which had been made to her. She wanted to sleep over it, and felt, to use her own pietistic phrase, deeply thankful, when at last the inn was safely vanishing in the distance, without her having met him. Had she but known she might have spared her fears. Roderick was really ill; too ill to observe that she neither came nor sent to enquire for him. He tossed about on the bed where he had lain down some hours before, hardly asleep and not quite awake. The heat of a fire and a feather bed, too many blankets, and Mrs. Tuppeny's toddy, had thrown him into something like a fever, yet fatigue and general oppression had stupified him past seeking relief. When the stupor lessened, a dull hot aching was in every joint, and he moved restlessly on the bed. Then the heavy eyes would close again in a kind of slumber, but the restless thoughts refused to go to sleep. An inarticulate anxiety clung to him, and he climbed up endless precipices in his dreams. Up and up he would drag himself, and anon Sophia would appear higher up still on a peak above him, and he would climb and climb to reach her. As he approached, her features would change, and, slowly taking the likeness of her mother, she would spurn him, and then with a cry he would lose his hold, and begin to fall down and down through endless depths of nothing, till at last in utter panic his limbs would move, and the spell of the nightmare broken, he would awake. Thus between waking and sleeping, the afternoon and the weary long night wore away. The sun was shining at last upon another day, and though manifestly ill, he was able to get into a gig and be driven home to Glen Effick. CHAPTER XV. _MARY_. It was a revival of the dear dead past to Mary Brown, to find herself again at Inchbracken. General Drysdale took her in to dinner, and, perhaps because he would not touch upon the present, leading, as it must, to her brother's defection from the national Church, nor, in fact, on that young man in any way or respect whatever, he talked to her about her father and mother. She found it very grateful to listen to their praises; and something like a tear glistened in her eye while she looked in the old gentleman's face, and the faint colour of her cheek deepened into a warmer pink.