Alice was weeping--she had forgot herself and Lewis for the moment. Her gentle heart could not fathom the stern depths of suffering, which still swelled in Mrs. Catherine's larger spirit, but she recognized the sovereignty of grief, and answered with her tears: "And there was the bride to come home to--the desolate bride, that had been dreaming vain dreams of pleasantness and hope to come. A year before you would have thought that if ever there were two fated to a bountiful and gladsome lot, it was Sholto Douglas and his trysted bride. Now, she was stricken down in her first agony, and he was lying in his stranger grave. "Know you, Alison, that there are woes like that wherever there are living men?--that there is some shadow on every lot, how fair soever, may be its beginning?--that even the like of you, in your youth and smiles, have a weird to watch and weep through, every one of you for her own self, and not another?" Alice looked up--the tears stealing over her cheeks, the "hysterica passio" swelling up in its "climbing sorrow" in her tightened breast. Her blue eyes looked fearfully and anxiously in Mrs. Catherine's face. This most sad history, Alice felt, was the preface of some personal evil to herself, some misfortune to Lewis. She could not speak--she only looked imploringly in sad fear and wonder into the face of her kinswoman. "My poor bairn!" said Mrs. Catherine, "you can think how Isabel mourned in her dark solitude? ye can feel for Isabel?" Alice started up, all her gay hopes and girlish happiness floating away before that blast, as such light things will float, and threw herself unconsciously at Mrs. Catherine's feet, kneeling there in incoherent grief and terror, and burying her fair head in the lap of her kinswoman: "What is it--what is it? I will bear it--tell me what it is." Mrs. Catherine's hand lay upon her fair hair in grave kindness. Mrs. Catherine bent down. "Alison! wherefore did ye not tell me of this unhappy tryste, that has been made between Lewis Ross and you?" Alice could not look up; trembling through all her slight figure, she waited for the next words. "My bairn! my poor fatherless bairn! if there was but any weight on my gray head that could keep off this sore stroke from your's! It is your appointed weird; ye must be strong, and listen to me. In the fulness of their joy and hope, it pleased the Lord to sunder for ever, in this world, the two I have told you of. Alison! there lies as deadly a bar between Lewis Ross and you; a bar that can never be passed, or lifted away in this life. You may hear of his welfare and prosperity, and he of yours; but in this world you must be strangers. It cannot last a day, this link between you; you cannot go a step further in this perilous road, Alison!"