So on Sundays she sat in her pew, in the kirk on the wooded hill, and there listened to the preacher's voice blending with the rustle of the trees and the cawing of the rooks in the ruined fane close by; but with an emotion in her heart never known before--that of feeling that ere long she would have a greater need of some one to lean on--of something to cling to in the coming loneliness that her heart foreboded to be near now. At last there came a day she was never to forget--a day that told her desolation was at hand. Seated in his Singapore chair at breakfast one morning, her father suddenly grew deadly pale; a spasm convulsed his features; his coffee-cup fell from his nerveless hand; and he gazed at her with all the terror and anguish in his eyes which he saw in her own. 'Papa--papa!' she exclaimed, and sprang to his side. He gazed at her wildly, vacantly, and muttered something about 'the Jhansi bullet.' Then she heard him distinctly articulate her name. 'Hester--my own darling--you here?' he said, with an effort; 'how sweet you look in that white robe. I always loved you in it, dear.' 'My dress is rose-coloured--a morning wrapper, papa,' said Hester, as the little hope that gathered in her heart passed away. 'So white--so pure--just like your marriage-dress, Hester! But you wore it the first day I saw you, long ago--long ago--at Earlshaugh, when you stood in the Red Drawing-room--and gave me a bouquet of violets from your breast. My own Hester!' 'Oh, papa--papa!' moaned the poor girl in dire distress, for she knew he spoke not of her but of her mother, who had reposed for years under the trees in the old kirkyard on the hill; and a choking sob of dismay escaped her. It was a stroke of paralysis that had fallen upon the Indian veteran, and he was borne to his bed, which he never left alive. Hour after hour did Maude hang over him, listening to his fevered breathing, and futile moanings, which no medical skill could repress or soothe; and the long day, and the terrible night--every minute seemed an age--passed on, and still the pallid girl watched there in the hopeless agony of looking for death and not for life. That long night--one of the earliest of winter--was at last on its way towards morning. All was still in the glen of the Esk save the murmur of the mountain stream and the rustle of the leaves in the shrubberies without, and there was a strange loneliness, a solemnity, in Hester's mind as she thought of Merlwood in its solitariness, with death and life, time and eternity, so nigh each other under its roof; and the ceaseless ticking of an antique clock in the hall fell like strokes of thunder on her brain, till she stopped it, lest the sound might disturb the invalid.