In this mood she set out one dull May afternoon immediately after her little crowd had dispersed, to see a small invalid whose place had been vacant among them for more than a week. It was Robbie Carlyle’s little daughter, Mary, who had been ill with some childish epidemic, and was now recovering. Helen had been struggling with the most painful mood of her nervous temperament this day--its irritability; she found herself a hundred times on the very point of unnecessary fault-finding--in spite of all her precautions, impatient hasty words had escaped from her lips; and now she was turning her sword against herself, and was in a bitter, painful, unhappy humour, which it was best to carry away out of the society of any whom it might wound, into the still country road, along which she went with the unequal pace, now slow, now hasty, which was usual to her. The gentle summer air, the dreamy silence just touched and made human with its floating far-away sounds of life, the dim sky above with its soft dark clouds and veiled sun--in these was a charm to which the unquiet spirit never failed to answer. A touch of the kindly humanity which makes the whole world kin, might have lifted her up in a moment into the midst of the sunny clouds of her own bright especial heaven; but when Nature was the physician, the effect was different; the unhappy mood stole away into the deep sadness peculiar to her, and she lingered now and then to look over the fair, dim country with those slanting lines of pale sunshine stealing over it, from the head of yon shrouded mountain in the west, her heart sinking into the depths the while. The cap of which Skiddaw wots when it is put on, was shading the dark brow of the Scottish hill, and the air was subdued and soft, and the wind sighed about the hedges as though its wings were drenched with rain. Few articulate thoughts were in the downcast mind of Helen; only the thread of linked and varied fancies, which sometimes quivered below the sunbeams like a golden chord, was now sad and drooping like the wind. The unconscious tears gathered in her eyes--the shadow fell heavily over her heart. Slowly along the quiet road she wandered enveloped in the mist of her changed mood. The annoyances and the little angers had vanished away, but she was very sad.