These visits, and the too certain end to which they tended, pained Anne deeply, overpowered her, indeed, sometimes with sick bewilderment, the more that in the present state of matters, she was perfectly powerless. Any step of her's might precipitate Lewis, so jealously alive to interference as he was, and make that certain, which was now only feared and deprecated, so Anne, like her friend in the Tower, had to wait perforce for the regular course of events, and with an anxiety still more intense and painful than Mrs. Catherine's. What but woe and mishap could come from this unhappy intercourse? What but pain and disappointment and sorrow to these two youthful hearts. Anne could perceive that it annoyed her step-mother; that Mrs. Ross, with her overweening partiality for, and pride in her only son, was inclined to take his attention to Alice Aytoun as a personal slight and injury to herself. But it was not because a connection so terrible existed between the families already--Alice had no friends to elevate the standing, nor portion to increase the wealth of her future partner, and therefore Mrs. Ross frowned upon the growing devotion of Lewis, and already, in many a peevish altercation and sarcastic allusion, had brought in Alice Aytoun's name--fanning thereby the flame which she hoped to extinguish. And during these months, the little girl, so strangely brought to Oran Mill, was learning the tongue of her new home rapidly. A strange junction, the liquid Spanish, which fell on Jacky's visionary ear so pleasantly, "like the words folk hear in dreams," made, mingled with these soft syllables of the homely, Scottish tongue, broken from what harshness soever might originally be in them, by the child's voice of lisping music. Mrs. Melder had been told to call her Lilias, and affection had already contracted the name into the familiar diminutive of "Lilie." A strange exotic lily the child seemed with her small, pale features and olive-tinted cheek, and flood of dusky silken hair, and she had become already a wonder in the parish. Mrs. Coulter sent for the miller's wife on some small pretext of business, that she might see her little lodger, and Lilie returned from Harrows laden with fruit, and toys, and sweetmeats, and leaving little Harry Coulter, the agriculturist's Benjamin, struggling with desperate energy to follow her, and hopelessly in love. Lilie had even been taken to the Tower, and half smothered with caresses from Alice, had received from Mrs. Catherine strange looks of musing melancholy, and one abrupt expression of wonder-- "Who was she like?" Miss Falconer herself had gallopped a couple of miles out of her way, and stopped at the Mill, with her horse in a foam, to make acquaintance with the little Donna. Jacky had constituted herself her bodyguard and attendant, and carried her off whole days on solitary rambles among the hills. There were few of all the circle round who were not interested in the stranger child.