But long before this deplorable conclusion was reached, within three or four months of the unceremonious marriage, while the laird was still the fond bridegroom and Peggy the tender bride, an accident happened which brought matters to an unexpected crisis. One windy October afternoon the laird had been helping to take down the first new stack to be thrashed or flailed out from the stack-yard of the home-farm, when by some chance he missed his footing, fell headlong from the stack-head among the horses’ feet below, and received a kick in the chest from one of the startled horses. He was taken up insensible and carried to the mansion-house. The misadventure created a lively sensation, and the news gathered gravity and tragic horror as it spread abroad. It was said that Drumsheugh was dead, that he had been vomiting blood, that he had never spoken, that he had cried loudly for Peggy Hedderwick to bid her a last farewell. In the conflicting testimony one serious bit of evidence was certain. Dr. Forsyth had been summoned post-haste from Craigie. Balcairnie had been seen riding like a madman from his biggest potatoe field, in which the gatherers had been toiling anxiously all day, for frost was in the air, and if the potatoes were not ‘pitted’ in time there would be havock among the earth-apples. It was almost night-fall before the calamitous tidings got Peggy’s length. They were thrown in at the half-open door of the cottage in which she and her mother dwelt, by an ill-conditioned drunken brute of a carter, who was driving by, and had caught a glimpse of the girl as she moved about between the dim gloaming without and the fire-light within. In the spirit of mischief and strange pleasure in inflicting pain which belongs to very small, low, and morbidly hostile natures, just as the man in other circumstances might have pelted her with a snow-ball in which lay lodged a cruelly sharp stone; so he called out to her in a bullying, inhumanly indifferent tone, ‘Hey! Peggy Hedderwick, what are you doing there? Do you ken your fine laird’s felled? He’s met his dead in the corn-yard of Drumsheugh an hour or twa syne.’