By these decisive means Miss Jean brought the house into composure and subordination, and put a stop to the growing romance which the maids had begun to build up. They said in the kitchen that Miss Heriot could not be going so much to the Spindle for nothing, that it was fine to talk about a sick lass, but that more inducement was necessary to take a young leddy there in all weathers, and that Mr. Chairles had found it out. This invention Miss Jean so far nipped in the bud, that she gave them all work to do, which occupied them fully and diverted their thoughts from this delightful fiction. The old lady had the spare room prepared for herself, and a fire lighted, a luxury never much out of place in St. Andrews, though it was but August, and the flush of Summer still ought to have been over the world. It was a gloomy night, dark clouds and darker sea, everything that was dismal and discouraging out of doors, and not much that was cheery within. Miss Jean herself, with many thoughts in her mind, established herself in the drawing-room after dinner--having sent Milly, much against her will, to bed--to wait for some news of her relations who had thus left the house empty to receive her. She sat in the unfamiliar room, looking out upon the old pinnacles of the cathedral ruins which were associated with many an early passage of her youth--and going back into her life, lived in it as old people do, feeling it present with her, notwithstanding the lively threads of present interest which crossed each other like a network over that landscape peculiarly her own which lay behind. Her quick mind darted in a moment from recollections of an evening fifty years ago, when she had wandered, not uncompanioned, through these ruins, to many a speculation as to how her grand-niece, Marjory, her representative, might be occupying herself, and what manner of interference “auld Charlie” might be making in some possible complication of affairs.