Kirsteen’s answer was to walk away. She went through the passage with her heart beating, and mounted the dark stair; there were few lights about the house, a solitary miserable candle at the top of the stair waving about in the wind that blew in from the open door, and another placed on a small table near the head of Mrs. Douglas’s bed. The invalid herself was quite in the dark shade with a curtain between her and this light. The whiteness of her worn face on the pillow betrayed where she was but little more. But by the bedside with the gleam of the candle upon her soft, beautiful hair, and her face, which Kirsteen thought was like the face of an angel, stood Jeanie, Jeanie woman-grown, the beauty that all her sisters had expected her to be, radiant in colour and expression. For the first moment the light that seemed to ray from Jeanie was the only thing that Kirsteen saw. It was what she had expected. It gave her almost a pang of sudden exquisite pleasure by her mother’s deathbed. “Did ye hear somebody, Jeanie, coming up the stair?” “It will be Merran, mother, with the things for the night.” “It canna be Merran; I know one foot from another though I’m a little dull, just a little dull in my hearing. Look out and see if your sister’s come.” “Do you mean Mary, mother?” “No, I’m not meaning Mary. She’s the one of all my bairns most like me, folk say--the same coloured hair--not like your red heads--and Alexander he was aye a brown-haired laddie. Eh, to think that I will never see one of them again!--and I’m just quite content, not frettin’ at all. They’ll be taken care of--they’ll get wives of their own. When they get wives--or men either--there’s but little room for their mother. But I’m not heeding--I’m just not heeding. I’m quite content. Look out, Jeanie, and see if that was your sister at the door.” Jeanie turned to do her mother’s bidding and found herself almost face to face with a lady whom she thought at first she had never seen before. She gave a little cry of instinctive alarm. “Is she there?” said the mother faintly from the bed. “I knew she would be there. Come to the other side, Kirsteen, that I may get the light upon ye, and see it’s you. Ay, it’s just you--my bonny woman!--but you’ve changed, you’ve changed.” “No, mother--just the same Kirsteen.” “In one way. I dinna doubt ye, my dear; but ye’ve come through trouble and sorrow. I’m thinking there was something I had to say, but it’s clean gone away out of my mind.” She had put out her hand to Kirsteen, and was smiling faintly upon her from amidst the pillows. “I knew ye were coming--I just heard the coach rattling all the day.” “But, mother, tell me how you are? That’s the most important thing--you’re easy, at least in no pain?”