"What has come over you? I have been marvelling these past mornings whether it was success or failure--a light heart or a downcast one, that made you forgetful of folk to whom all your doings are matters of interest, and have been since you could use your own proper tongue to testify of them. Think you this lad Lillie has any further knowledge than you have yourself? I count it unlikely, or else he is a pithless laggard, not worthy to call Norman Rutherford friend, and Norman was not one to choose his friends lightly, or be joined in near amity with a shallow head and a faint heart. So I would have you build little on the hope of getting good tidings from him, seeing that if he had known anything, he must have put it to its fitting use before now. You say it gave him a fever? I like not folk, child, who are thrown into fevers by sore trouble and anguish, and make themselves a burden and a cumbrance, when they ought to be quickened to keener life--the more helpful and strong, the greater the extremity; it augurs a narrow vessel and a frail spirit in most cases--it may be other in his. Certain he bore himself like a man in the night you tell me of. Let me see his sister, if you can bring her; there, seems--if ye draw like the life--to be no soil in her for the cowardice of sickness to flourish on, from which I take my certainty, that if she had kent any good word concerning this dark mystery, she must have put it to the proof before now.