There came a sudden gust of wind among the branches. Joseph, little used to trees and their ways with the wind, turned toward the sound, and Malcolm unconsciously followed his movement. When they turned again the laird had vanished, and they took their way homeward in sadness. What passed next with the laird can be but conjectured. It came to be well enough known afterward where he had been hiding; and had it not been dusk as they came down the river-bank the two men might, looking up to the bridge from below, have had it suggested to them. For in the half-spandrel wall between the first arch and the bank they might have spied a small window looking down on the sullen, silent gloom, foam-flecked with past commotion, that crept languidly away from beneath. It belonged to a little vaulted chamber in the bridge, devised by some vanished lord as a kind of summer-house--long neglected, but having in it yet a mouldering table, a broken chair or two and a rough bench. A little path led steep from the end of the parapet down to its hidden door. It was now used only by the game-keepers for traps and fishing-gear and odds and ends of things, and was generally supposed to be locked up. The laird had, however, found it open, and his refuge in it had been connived at by one of the men, who, as they heard afterward, had given him the key and assisted him in carrying out a plan he had devised for barricading the door. It was from this place he had so suddenly risen at the call of Blue Peter, and to it he had as suddenly withdrawn again--to pass in silence and loneliness through his last purgatorial pain.[1] [Footnote 1: Com' io fui dentro, in un bogliente vetro Gittato mi sarei per rinfrescarmi, Tant' era ivi lo'ncendio senza metro. _Del Purgatorio_, xxvii. 49.] Mrs. Stewart was sitting in her drawing-room alone: she seldom had visitors at Kirkbyres--not that she liked being alone, or indeed being there at all, for she would have lived on the Continent, but that her son's trustees, partly to indulge their own aversion to her, taking upon them a larger discretionary power than rightly belonged to them, kept her too straitened, which no doubt in the recoil had its share in poor Stephen's misery. It was only after scraping for a whole year that she could escape to Paris or Homburg, where she was at home. There her sojourn was determined by her good or ill fortune at faro. What she meditated over her knitting by the firelight--she had put out her candles--it would be hard to say, perhaps unwholesome to think: there are souls to look into which is, to our dim eyes, like gazing down from the verge of one of the Swedenborgian pits. But much of the evil done by human beings is as the evil of evil beasts: they know not what they do--an excuse which, except in regard to the past, no man can make for himself, seeing the very making of it must testify its falsehood.