This was in the silence of the evening, when she sat by the window, looking out at the flush of sunset which still dyed all the western sky, and lit up the Firth with crimson and gold. Milly stood close by her, with an arm round her neck. The child had said her hymn, and discharged all her Sunday duties. She was vaguely sad, because the others were sad--yet satisfied in that she had fulfilled all personal requirements; and over Marjory, too, a sense of quiet had stolen. The dead were in their graves and at rest; the living remained, with work, and tears, and dying all before them. She talked softly to Uncle Charles as the sunset lights faded, feeling an indescribable quiet come over her mind as the twilight came over the earth. Only Mr. Heriot sat alone in the library, with his head bent on his breast, doing nothing, reading nothing; thinking over the same thoughts for hours together. The old father felt that he had come to an end; but for the others it was not so: the pause in their lives was over, and existence had begun again. CHAPTER IX. Next morning life began as usual for the saddened household. Breakfast, which had once been so lively a meal, passed over in comparative silence. Mr. Charles, indeed, did what he could to talk to the stranger, making conversation about the news and the newspapers, with a vague hope of enlivening the party. “I daresay, as an Englishman, you don’t know much about Scotch affairs, Mr. Fanshawe,” he said. “If we were an ill-conditioned people like the Irish now, we might lead Parliament a pretty dance; but as we find it more to our advantage to keep quiet and mind our own business, nobody puts themselves out of the way.” “And then you are very well off, which Ireland is not,” said Fanshawe, who had Irish blood in his veins. “I am not so sure about that. We have our grievances like other folk. Our affairs are thrust to the wall for every kind of nonsense. Who cares to come when it’s a Scotch night, or when Scotch affairs are to be discussed? A handful of Scotch members--” “It is like everything else,” said Mr. Heriot, breaking in harshly; “even, if you come to that, who are our Scotch members? In the very next county one of our best men was turned out the other day, to make room for some English radical or other. They hire our houses, they shoot our moors, they clear the fish out of our rivers, they treat us like a hunting-ground. Our old habits are destroyed, our old families dying out--”