While she spoke thus, indulging the natural irritability of disposition and profession, which began to mingle itself with her grief when its first uncontrolled bursts were gone by, she held the door about one-third part open, and placed herself in the gap, as if to render the visitor's entrance impossible. But the voice of her husband was heard from within— "Wha's that, Maggie? what for are ye steaking them out?—let them come in; it doesna signify an auld rope's end wha comes in or wha gaes out o' this house frae this time forward." The woman stood aside at her husband's command, and permitted Lord Glenallan to enter the hut. The dejection exhibited in his broken frame and emaciated countenance, formed a strong contrast with the effects of grief, as they were displayed in the rude and weatherbeaten visage of the fisherman, and the masculine features of his wife. He approached the old woman as she was seated on her usual settle, and asked her, in a tone as audible as his voice could make it, "Are you Elspeth of the Craigburnfoot of Glenallan?" "Wha is it that asks about the unhallowed residence of that evil woman?" was the answer returned to his query. "The unhappy Earl of Glenallan." "Earl!—Earl of Glenallan!" "He who was called William Lord Geraldin," said the Earl; "and whom his mother's death has made Earl of Glenallan." "Open the bole," said the old woman firmly and hastily to her daughter-in-law, "open the bole wi' speed, that I may see if this be the right Lord Geraldin—the son of my mistress—him that I received in my arms within the hour after he was born—him that has reason to curse me that I didna smother him before the hour was past!" The window, which had been shut in order that a gloomy twilight might add to the solemnity of the funeral meeting, was opened as she commanded, and threw a sudden and strong light through the smoky and misty atmosphere of the stifling cabin. Falling in a stream upon the chimney, the rays illuminated, in the way that Rembrandt would have chosen, the features of the unfortunate nobleman, and those of the old sibyl, who now, standing upon her feet, and holding him by one hand, peered anxiously in his features with her light-blue eyes, and holding her long and withered fore-finger within a small distance of his face, moved it slowly as if to trace the outlines and reconcile what she recollected with that she now beheld. As she finished her scrutiny, she said, with a deep sigh, "It's a sair—sair change; and wha's fault is it?—but that's written down where it will be remembered—it's written on tablets of brass with a pen of steel, where all is recorded that is done in the flesh.—And what," she said after a pause, "what is Lord Geraldin seeking from a poor auld creature like me, that's dead already, and only belongs sae far to the living that she isna yet laid in the moulds?"