Till the advent of Bevil Goring, how drearily dull her life seemed to have been at Chilcote! It was all very well to cull and arrange bouquets with all an artist's eye to colour and form, to warble the old songs her mother had taught in brighter days at Essilmont and elsewhere, with all that sweetness which she inherited from her, and vary these occupations by attendance on her fowls and other pets, hunting with old Archie for the eggs when the hens had taken to laying under the hedges; turning dresses, cleaning her own gloves, and, while longing for the purse of Fortunatus, striving to make sixpence go as far as a shilling, feeling that darning and mending were her purgatory, and economy the bane of her existence; but into that existence, with the love of Bevil Goring, there had come a ray of brightest sunshine, with a new and hitherto unknown sense of happiness. But, alas! it would seem they were now to be followed by sorrow, and the gloom of a hopeless night which would have no end. As the afternoon and evening stole on, Alison's heart beat wildly and anxiously for the time of her meeting--too probably the last one--with Bevil, and after a frugal dinner of cold mutton and boiled rice (a menu at which her father made more than one grimace), with old Archie Auchindoir in attendance, solemnly and respectfully, as if it had been some banquet suited to Lucullus, when Sir Ranald began to doze over his bottle of carefully-aired St. Peray 'Hermitage'--most probably the last he possessed--Alison rose softly from the table and stole into the entrance hall, where the hands on the clock dial indicated that the hour was nearly eight. She assumed the hat and shawl she usually wore when in the garden, and passing though the latter, in her resolution to meet Bevil, almost heedless if her father missed her, she was about to open the gate that led to the beech avenue, when she was startled--rooted to the spot for a moment--by seeing, or fancying she saw, before her, amid the dark and uncertain shadows of the November evening, the blacker outline of a dog--of a hound before her. At this conviction a gasping cry escaped her, and a sense of suffocation came into her slender throat; inspired by a courage beyond what she deemed she possessed, she darted forward, but the outline seemed to melt away before her or elude her eyes. No dog was there, nor could there have been, for no dog of mortal mould could have cleared that lofty wall, and no sound followed the disappearance. All was still save the drip of the dew as it fell from the overladen leaf of an evergreen. Alison felt her heart beating painfully, while a deadly chill seemed to settle upon it. Had the family boding of evil been before her? Oh, no, no--impossible. And yet it was said that when Ellon and her mother died---- She tried to thrust the thought away.