"You don't understand the question," he said, with something of his old violence. "I am ready to destroy myself when I think I ever gave that man an opportunity of seeing poor Margaret, and now that he is gone I cannot pretend to regret him. His death has ended a terrible complication." "I cannot follow your way of thinking," Mrs. Dorriman said, feeling somehow that this did not sound right. "Well, you had best leave me just now, and when you have quite disentangled your ideas we can renew the subject. I never knew such a brain as yours, it seems to be generally in a hopeless state of muddle about everything." This complimentary speech nearly reduced her to tears, and she hurried from the room only to be immediately called back. "I am a brute and you must forgive me, Anne," he said; "and there is another thing I want to speak to you about." His voice sounded strange to her, and looking at him she saw that he was agitated. "Say nothing just now to distress or worry yourself, brother," she said, quickly. He took no notice of her, he tapped the table before him with a massive paper-cutter, then he said in an odd tone, "What were you saying to-day about Margaret's coming to Scotland?" "The doctor wants her to have sea air and Scotch air, she wishes to come." "Here?" "No, not here. Somewhere (she does not care where) she has never seen. Some place, with no recollections clinging to it. "Lornbay?" "She has been there. No! not Lornbay." "How would Inchbrae do?" her brother asked as he watched her face closely. Her colour came and went, then her eyes filled with tears. "Alas! that is out of the question." "Is it?" He seemed to speak with a sudden sense of difficulty. "Anne," he said at length, "have you really never guessed, never thought, that Inchbrae could not be sold? Do you know so little really of any business matters as not to know that without your consent, without many formalities, the place, which is your place, could not be sold?" "Not sold! and the place is really mine?" said the poor woman, feeling naturally more bewildered than ever. "Yes, it is yours," he said, trying to cover his sense of shame by speaking carelessly. His feelings towards his sister were so much altered now, that looking back upon the brutality and roughness with which he had moulded her fate gave him a pang he never would have believed in former days. And there was something else, there was a page in his history which often haunted him now. The burden of knowing it even, could not be anything but painful to him, and the pain grew now each day more and more intolerable.