The hand of some one had thrown a cloth over the corpse. The room was filled with people--but all their power and capacity of horror had been exhausted--and the silence was now almost like that which attends a natural death, when all the neighbours are assembled for the funeral. Alice, with little Ann beside her, kneeled at the bed, nor feared to lay her head close to the covered corpse--sobbing out syllables that showed how passionately she prayed--and that she and her little niece--and, oh! for that unhappy father--were delivering themselves up into the hands of God. That father knelt not--neither did he sit down--nor move--nor groan--but stood at the foot of the bed, with arms folded almost sternly--and with his eyes fixed on the sheet, in which there seemed to be neither ruth nor dread--but only an austere composure, which, were it indeed but resignation to that dismal decree of Providence, had been most sublime--but who can see into the heart of a man either righteous or wicked, and know what may be passing there, breathed from the gates of heaven or of hell! Soon as the body had been found, shepherds and herdsmen, fleet of foot as the deer, had set off to scour the country far and wide, hill and glen, mountain and morass, moor and wood, for the murderer. If he be on the face of the earth, and not self-plunged in despairing suicide into some quagmire, he will be found--for all the population of many districts are now afoot, and precipices are clomb till now brushed but by the falcons. A figure, like that of a man, is seen by some of the hunters from a hill-top, lying among the stones by the side of a solitary loch. They separate, and descend upon him, and then, gathering in, they behold the man whom they seek--Ludovic Adamson, the murderer.