CHAPTER VII. These days passed on in suspense and anxiety to Mrs. Catherine. Uncertain what to believe or disbelieve, concerning the young man in whose fortunes she was so deeply interested, her strong spirit chafed and struggled in its compulsory inactivity. Nor did Lewis's report of Mrs. Duncombe's friends, in any degree still her anxiety. Fashionable ladies stood low in Mrs. Catherine's opinion at all times; and her strong nationality aggravated tenfold her dislike to fashionable ladies in Paris--French or semi-French. Had it not been for Alice, Mrs. Catherine herself would have been on her way to Paris ere now. But unwilling to send the girl abruptly home, and riveted besides by a hundred little ties, which made her absence from the Tower (she had not left it since her sorrowful journey, thirty years' ago, from Sholto's island grave) seem an impossibility; she waited--we are constrained to admit, not patiently--for further tidings, inclined to hope sometimes that Mr. Foreman's benevolent surmise might be well-founded; and anon, cast down, and venting her grief in a show of bitter indignation at "the prodigal that could sell his birthright." Many solitary hours were spent during that anxious fortnight (for mails travelled tardily thirty years ago) in the little room--and many wrestlings of secret, silent prayer these narrow walls were witness to. Jacky, gliding hither and thither in her elfin ubiquity, could hear Mrs. Catherine's step shake the floor; and listened in tremulous awe and reverence sometimes to those often-repeated words, the burden of Mrs. Catherine's anxiety: "Isabel Balfour's one son--that might have been _your_ firstborn, Sholto Douglas!" But Jacky, with a sentiment of honor peculiar to herself, kept her knowledge of Mrs. Catherine's trouble, jealously within her own mind, and in the intervals of her heterogeneous occupations, and no less heterogeneous studies, wove dreams of that young Laird of Strathoran, over whom Mrs. Catherine prayed and mourned--and creating for his especial service, some such wondrous vassal as the Genii of Aladdin, conjured Sholto Douglas back to life and lands again, and made the prodigal his heir and son.