Is there anything in the wide world so terrible as the slow dread which comes as the minutes pass unavailingly by?--as the certainty that something has gone amiss seems to grow from the very passion of protestation against the possibility?--and then, when fear has gone, and unknown grief is the companion of the fruitless search, in which a wild hope will spring up sometimes to intensify the pain? Of such things all men may surely pray that fancy, and not memory, may speak. It was Tom Kennedy's letter--lighter than the love which had penned it--that gave the first clue, and the hope went out from Paul Macleod's face for ever when his quick eye found it like a foam bubble in a backwater near the ford. "It will be in the Long Pool we must be looking," whispered the rough, tender voices to each other, but Paul heard. Paul knew, Paul understood what would come--if not that night, then the next day--or the next. But Fate was merciful, and did not prolong the agony. "Don't look, laird! Oh, my dear! you that I carried in my arms as a laddie--don't look," sobbed old Macpherson, as, with the first streak of the following dawn, the men who had been working all the night long bent over the oil-strewn, torch-lit depth through which the grapnel came up, slowly, heavily. But Paul was no coward. He had looked death steadily in the face many and many a time. "Stand back, John!" he said quietly. "I'll lift her in." And as he held her there in his arms while they drifted down stream a space to a shelving grassy bank, he bent over her calm face, and thanked "whatever gods there be," passionately, for the gift of that sharp cut just showing beneath the damp curls through which some friendly rock had brought a quick end to life. As he looked up again, the dawn was out-paling the stars, and the birds in the alder-bushes were stirring into song. "What day is it?" he asked, drearily, of old John; and that sudden forgetfulness was the only sign he showed at the time of the terrible shock he had sustained. Yet none who noticed it could ever forget the look which came to his face, when, guided by the clue given by the child's cap still clenched in the girl's hand, a further search ended in the discovery of little Paul's body, and Marjory's lover realised that she must have lost her life in the effort to save his namesake. Indeed, in after years, old John, telling the tale, would often say that he never went in such fear of seeing murder done as when Mr. Gillespie had suggested the touching propriety of burying the brave girl and her little friend side by side. He had even taken the bunch of rowan berries found in the boy's fingers from the girl's breast, where they had laid them, as no doubt they had been intended to lie, saying, in a sort of fury, that nothing of the child's should come near her. But beyond that he made no sign.