"And why not now?" Hamish answered almost roughly. "Do you think _you_ only have a cause for grieving? Tell me, my mistress, if we, humble as we are, and not to be thought of in comparison with your ladyship's honor, if we have not lost--are losing nothing? Ah! if you could but hear the weeping and wailing that is going on among the creatures down-stairs, you would never do us such a wrong as to suppose that _your_ heart is the only one sore and bleeding to-day!" "Sore and bleeding! Yes! yes! I doubt it not," moaned the lady sadly. "Sore and bleeding; but not widowed--not childless; they have still husbands and children--they have not lost as I have lost!" "They have lost--not, may be, quite so much, but yet enough, and more than enough, to set them wailing," answered Hamish firmly-- "they have lost a master, who was more like a father than a master, and a young mistress, who was all as one as a daughter to every one of them; and moreover," he added mournfully--"and moreover, instead of the kind hand and generous heart that has reigned over them till now, they are going to be handed over, (as if they were so many stocks or stones encumbering the land,) whether they like it or whether they don't, to the tender mercies of those very men who thought it neither sin nor shame to make the child a shield against the soldier's sword, when they fought knee-deep in blood at the siege of Tredagh!" "Why do you say these things, Hamish?" she almost shrieked in her anguish. "Is it my fault? Could I help it? or why do you reproach me with it?" "_Your_ fault! No, indeed, it is not. More's the pity; for if you could have helped it, to a dead certainty it never would have happened," said Hamish, glad that he had roused her, even if only to a fit of anger. "But though you cannot prevent these things, my mistress, you can at all events comfort the creatures that have to bear them, by showing that you have feelings for their sorrows as well as for your own." "I give comfort! God help me, I give comfort!" she answered, with a sort of passionate irony in her manner; adding, however, immediately afterward, in a softer tone, "How can I give comfort, Hamish--I who need it so entirely myself?" {179} "That is the very thing," cried Hamish eagerly. "God love you, madam! Do you not see that the only real comfort you could give them would be the allowing them to try at least and comfort you?" "Bid them pray, then, for the safe journey of my loved ones," she answered hoarsely--"that is the only real comfort they can give me." "And why, then, couldn't we pray all together?" cried Hamish, struck suddenly by a bright idea. "Why wouldn't you let them come up here, madam? I warrant you they would pray as the best of them never prayed before, if they only seen your ladyship's honor kneeling and praying in the midst of them."