And then even if the walk, by dint of a sunset or some other occurrence, had been enlivening, there was always the shock of coming back, the shutting of her door against every invasion of life, the quiet that might have been comfort to her old grandmother, the old leddy who had spun the yarn for that web of linen, and received it home with triumph--was it for the plenishing of Lily unborn? Lily came to have a little horror of that old leddy. She figured her to herself spinning, spinning, the little whirr of the wheel in its monotony going on for day after day. Lily did not think of the sons away in the world--Robert wherever there was fighting; her own father always in trouble--that filled the old leddy’s thoughts, which were spun into that yarn, and might have made many a pattern of mystic meaning in the cold snowy linen which looked so meaningless. She used to sit in the silent room, feeling that from some corner the old leddy’s eye was fixed upon her over the whirring wheel, till she could bear it no more. She went down to Kinloch-Rugas to return Helen’s visit, but that was not a happy experience. The old minister, half seen in the gloaming, seated like a large shadow by the fire, gave her always a thrill of alarm. She had hoped that he would not have treated her as a secret, that he would have addressed her by her new name, and set her at once in a true position. But he did not do this. He looked at her not unkindly, and spoke to her with a compassionate tone in his voice. But he too seemed to accept the necessity which had been forced on her by a kind of unspoken command, a dilemma from which she could not escape. In that case the consciousness of being in the presence of a man who knew all, but made no sign, sitting there by the side of innocent Helen, who knew nothing, and who treated herself in all simplicity as the girl-Lily, the same as she had known before, was intolerable; and Lily did not go back again, much as the refuge of some other house to go to was wanted in her desolate state. “You’ll come and see me, Helen?” “That will I, my dear. You must not mind my father. He is kind, kind in his heart, and always a soft place for you.” “I am not thinking that he is unkind,” said Lily. Ah, no, the minister was not unkind! He was sorry for the young abandoned wife; for, as he thought, the young betrayed woman; and Lily, though she was not aware of this last aggravation, yet resented it, feeling the pity in his tone. And why should any one pity her, or venture to be sorry for her, and she, with no secret in her own honest intention, Ronald Lumsden’s lawful wife?