“I canna think you will say it’s strange, if ye consider,” said the Scotchwoman; “plenty folk here must have seen your mother. It’s no as if you were ignorant--and it’s no as if I had anything to say but as I’ve been led to say it to others, I wouldna have you think there was a falseness. She was young, and she was feeble, poor thing, when I saw her. It’s more than five and twenty years ago, when him that’s now Mr. Arden had but lately come into this weary world.” “You speak in such a strange way,” said Clare--“him that’s now Mr. Arden! Do you mean my brother Edgar? He is just twenty-five now.” “He was but an infant, and well I mind it,” said the old woman, shaking her head with mournful meaning. “It was a sore time to me--death and trouble was in my house; and, oh, the trouble and the deaths I have had, Miss Arden! To hear of them would frighten the like of you. But first I must tell you why I canna bring Jeanie here. Two years ago, or may be more--two months more, for it was in the month of April--your father came to see me. Him and me, I told you, had met before. There were things I kent that were of consequence to him, and things he kent that were of consequence to me. Jeanie and her brother Willie--a bonnie blythe laddie--were both about the house. Willie was a sailor, sore against my will; and, oh, Miss Arden, so bonnie a boy! Your father was real kind. It’s been hard, hard to bear--but he meant to be kind. He got my Willie a ship out of Liverpool. The poor laddie went away from us--it’s two years this June--as blythe as ony bridegroom; and, Miss Arden, he’s never come back----” “Never come back!” Clare’s wonder was so great that she repeated the last words without any real sense of their meaning, as she would have repeated anything that made a pause in this strange narrative. Her father! She seemed to herself to possess his later life--to know its every detail--to hold it, as it were, in her hands. He had never done anything without telling her--without consulting her, she would have said. Yet here was a secret of which she knew nothing. She was not selfish, but her mind was not so readily open to the affairs of others as was that of her brother. She never thought of the young sailor, or of the old mother, who spoke so sadly. She thought only of her father and his secret. What were the others to her? Of course she would have been sorry for them had their sorrows been sufficiently impressed on her imagination. But in the meantime it was her father she was thinking of, with bewildering wonder and pain.