She hid her burning face in her hands. She fell a-weeping; tears more poignant and real than any she had yet shed for Tom. Her mind turned against itself, lost in that misery of moral confusion which makes the problem of life so doubly bitter. She dared not say to herself that the least honourable explanation was the least terrible; but her thoughts went on in spite of her, against her will, shaping before her a picture of what might have been. This peasant woman in Pitcomlie, mistress of everything, the successor of all the Heriot ladies, filling her own mother’s place, Marjory’s sister, Milly’s guardian placed on the same level with them, almost superior to them--good heavens! She disowned the thoughts that thus struggled in her. She tried to drive them from her mind, to ignore them, to introduce other feelings in their place, and cried, and hid her face and could not. God had stepped in and preserved the house from this degradation; He had saved them perhaps at the last moment. And things being as they were, and poor Tom doomed anyhow, God be thanked, might not she say it? deep down where nobody could hear, in the depths of her heart. Marjory was breathless after this battle with her thoughts; she dragged herself out of it she scarcely knew how, frightened to think what she had been thinking, scared as a man is who has travelled in the dark, when morning shows him the precipices he has passed--or like a drowning man who has been struggling with the angry waves, she crept forth upon dry land, and lay there exhausted, trying not to think, hearing the great searollers break beneath, too low to harm her. It seemed to her that she had passed through a terrible conflict, and it made her heart sick to think that this perhaps was the secret which Tom had intended to tell her. Perhaps he had meant to commend the girl to her care, to claim her affection and sympathy; and for the moment she felt fiercely glad that he had not done so, that she was bound by no sort of visible or invisible tie to this unknown Isabell. Yes, she was glad he had not lived to tell that secret, glad he had been stopped from disgracing the family. It hardly seemed to her, for the moment, that the exemption of the house from so great a shame and injury by Tom’s death, was too great a thing to have been done by Providence for the sake of the Heriots. She seemed no longer sorry, no longer a mourner, but glad and comforted to think that God had stepped in and stopped it, perhaps, at the last moment when there was no time to lose.