And straightway the three women were by the bedside of the patient, in whose throat Death was already sounding his rattle, after the last effort of exhausted nature to give to the world a life in exchange for her own; and Mr Whitelaw was there too to witness the dying throes of his wife, with perhaps the thought in his mind that the gods are pitiless as well as foolish, for what was the use of giving him a dead child in recompense for a dead mother, and taking away from him, at the very same moment, the said two thousand merks of good Scotch money. Wherein, so far, Mr Whitelaw was himself unjust to these much abused gods; but he did not know as yet that the child had cried, and who knows what consoling effect that circumstance might have had upon one who was what Pindar calls “a man of money.” At least, we will give to any man more than one of these merks who will show us out of the great “Treasury of Evils,” mentioned by the Greek poets, any one which cannot be ameliorated by money. And so Mr Whitelaw heard, in the last expiring breath of Mrs Janet Monypenny the departing sign of the loss of the three greatest good things of this world--a wife, a child, and a tocher. But the moral oscillation comes round as sure as that of the pendulum, and in accordance with that law Mr Whitelaw was, within a short time after the death of his wife, told by Mrs Gilchrist that the child had made the much-wished-for sign of life. A communication, this, very easily accounted for, but we do not undertake to explain why, when Mr Whitelaw heard it, he was scarcely equal to the task of preventing an expression upon his sorrowful countenance which an ill-natured person would call a smile. Nor, indeed, is there any way of explaining so inexplicable a phenomenon, except by having recourse to the fact mentioned by Burns, that “man is a riddle.” A solution which will also serve us when we further narrate that this small wail of the child lightened wonderfully Mr Whitelaw’s duty in getting all things arranged for the funeral, including the melancholy peculiarity of getting the coffin made that was to contain a mother and her first-born. Nay, it enabled him even at the funeral to meet the triumphant look of his brother-in-law, Writer George, as it clearly said, even in the midst of his tears, “You owe me two thousand merks;” for we are to remember that Mr Whitelaw, in exchange for the writer’s perfidy in not mentioning to him the necessity of a contract of marriage, had with a spice of malice concealed from him the fact of the child having been heard to cry, and then it was natural for the writer to suppose that the child had been born dead.