"Hark!" said the housekeeper, as a light foot sounded on the piazza and came in through the hall. "There's the lassie hersel--I ken her step among a thousand. I'll just send her in to you the moment she has thrawn aff her bonnet." And the old woman departed on her errand. There must have been an acuteness beyond nature, in the ears of old Elspeth, if she indeed knew the tread of the young girl; for her step, as she entered the room, was so slow, laggard and lifeless, so unlike the usual springing rapidity of her girlish nature, that even her lover might have been pardoned for failing to recognize it. It was as if some crushing weight fettered her limbs and bowed down her brow. And a crushing weight indeed rested upon her--the first unendurable grief of her young life--the knowledge of her only brother's shame. Robert Brand marked the slow step and saw the downcast head; and little as he could possibly know of the connection of that demeanor with the subject of his previous thought, it was not of that cheerful and reassuring character calculated to restore the lost equanimity of a man insulted in the tenderest point of his honor and chafed beyond human endurance. His first words were rough and peremptory: "Why do you move in that manner, girl, when you come to see _me_? I do not like it--do not let me see any more of it!" "I was coming, father!" was poor Elsie's only answer. "So I see--at the rate of ten feet an hour! What is the matter with you?" "Nothing." "Nothing?--do not tell me that, girl! I know better, or you would never carry that gloomy face and move as if you were going to your grandmother's funeral!" "Indeed there is nothing the matter with me, father; but there soon will be, if you scold me!" and the young girl, making a terrible effort to be cheerful, came up to his side, put her arm around his neck and pressed her lips to his forehead with a movement so pure and fond that it might have softened Nero at the moment of ordering his last wholesale murder. It partially disarmed the pained and querulous father. He put his arm around the daughter's waist, returned the pressure and seemed to be soothed for a moment by resting his head against the bosom that pressed close to him. But the demon that had been roused could only sleep thus temporarily. Directly he put her away, though not roughly, looked her full in the face, and asked: "Where is your brother?" "You know he went down to town this morning, and he has not yet come home," was the reply, with an effort not by any means a successful one, to keep the voice from quavering. The practised ear of the father detected the difference between that intonation and the usual unembarrassed utterance of his daughter; and he naturally connected it at once with the restraint of her manner, and noticed an evasion in her answer that might otherwise have escaped him.