By-and-by, they had returned to their original positions. Mrs. Catherine seated herself in her chair again, and Alice glided down passively, and lay like a broken lily, with her head hidden in Mrs. Catherine's lap. She was stunned and overpowered. The gentle heart lay in a kind of stupor, a dead and vacant sleep; she hardly felt it beat. The hope, and shame, and anger, the very wonder and grief, seemed gone; yet in her crushed apathy, she listened--the faintest word, uttered near, would not have been lost on the ears so nervously awake to every sound. She was waiting for further confirmation of the strange fate pronounced upon her. "Are you content?" said Mrs. Catherine, lifting the fair head tenderly in her hand--"are you content to believe me, my poor bairn, and to give up the gladness of your youth? Speak to me, Alison. I have maybe been harsher than I should be with your gentle nature, and I am asking you to make a sore sacrifice. For the sake of your kindly mother, Alice; for the sake of your honorable and upright brother James: for the memory's sake of your dead father, whom you never saw, I ask you to give up this stranger lad. He was nothing to you three months ago. They have nourished you, and cherished you, all the days of your life. Believe me, Alison, my bairn, that what I have told you is true; and, for their sake, give up this Lewis Ross. The bar between you is deadly and unchangeable: you cannot pass it over, were you to wait a lifetime." Alice lifted her wan cheek from Mrs. Catherine's knee, and looked up with sad, beseeching eyes. "What is it? Tell me what it is?" "It might do you ill, but it could not do you good," said Mrs. Catherine. "Take my word, Alison, and give me your promise. It is a thing that cannot change--that nothing in this world can make amends for. Alison, it is your weird--it has been laid on you, to prove what strength you have. You must make the sacrifice, hard though it be." "I have not any strength," murmured poor little Alice, in her plaintive, complaining voice: "I am not strong, and there is no one with me. Mrs. Catherine, what is it? Tell me what it is?" "Bairn," said Mrs. Catherine, "you would need to be strong to listen to the story, and I have withheld it to spare you. You are but a frail, young, silly thing, to have such troubles shadowing you; but it may be most merciful, in the end, to let you ken it all. Listen to me." Mrs. Catherine paused for a moment, and then resumed: "You have heard tell of your father, and how he died a violent death? Alison Aytoun, did you ever hear who it was that killed him?"