“It means our ain private affairs, that neither you nor any stranger has aught to do with,” said Mrs. Murray, looking up with an air as proud as Clare’s own. And then she returned in a moment to her natural tone. “I am no anxious because she has fainted. She will come out of her faint, poor bairn; but it’s sore, sore work, when you think it’s all passing away, that the look of a man she never saw before should bring it back again. I canna tell ye my private history, Miss Arden. I may have done wrong in my day, and I may be suffering for it; but I canna tell it a’ to a stranger; and that is what it means--no an accident, but our ain private affairs that are between me and my Maker, and no one beside.” “But she knew Mr. Arden!” said Clare. “The man she took him for is dead; he was a man that did evil to me and mine, and brought us to evil,” said the grandmother, solemnly. “The life is coming back to her; and oh, if ye would but go away, and keep yon gentleman away! If we were to bide here for a year, I could tell ye no more.” Wretched with suspicion, unbelieving and unhappy, Clare turned away. Had she been capable of feeling any additional blow to her pride, that dismissal would have given it; but her pride was in abeyance for the moment, swallowed up in wonder and anxious curiosity. “The man she took him for is dead”--was that true, or a lie invented to screen one who had betrayed poor Jeanie. The girl herself could not surely be deceived. And if Arthur Arden had wrought this ruin, what remained for Clare? CHAPTER XXIV.