Widow Miller's humble domicile was divided from the house where our friend the dominie reposed, by a narrow lane. It stood three or four yards back from the frontage of the neighbouring cottages, which afforded space for a small parterre of flowers, at one time the pride of poor Jessy's heart, and watered with her own hands; but many a hot tear had lately trickled on their leaves, down the poor girl's pale and faded countenance, and strange rumours had become rife in the secluded village of the flower of the whole strath having been tainted by the blight of some scoundrel. Her anxious and altered appearance, and the evident misery of the poor widow her mother, were melancholy proofs of the correctness of the surmise. _Gradually the sough settled down on Saunders Skelp_--for who so likely to be the cause as the avowed lover of the girl, and, as people thought, her betrothed husband? The report of Jessy's misfortune soon reached the person whom it most concerned. At first it fairly stunned him, and then such crushing misery overwhelmed the poor fellow's whole soul, when he became convinced of its truth, that it nearly drove him mad altogether. The morning after he had been made acquainted with the heart-breaking fact, the dominie was sitting dejectedly at the breakfast-table (with his elbow planted quite unconcernedly in the very middle of the plate _among the het parritch_), opposite the auld _betherel_,[3] who was munching his food in silence, and eyeing his son every now and then with a most vinegar aspect. At length he broke out--"Braw wark, dominie--braw wark ye have made o't atween ye." (The poor fellow raised his disconsolate visage, and looked innocently in his parent's face.) "Ay, you may look surprised Saunders, but that sham sheep face will no deceive me; for--God forgie me, but I wonder the sicht did not turn me intil stane--I marked you come out o' Jessy Miller's window this blessed morning at grey daylicht, stick-leg and grey coat, just as you sit there, as plain as I see ye the noo." [3] Betherel, or minister's man. _Anglice_, beadle. The poor fellow was roused almost to madness at this unjust and most cruel aspersion, and denied most vehemently that he had been out of the house that morning at all. But the old man _threeped_ that he saw him bodily stump through the wee garden, and disappear round the corner, where he had no doubt he had stolen in by the window of his room that fronted that way, but which he could not see from where he stood. "It couldna be me, father; as I sall answer to God it wasna me. My wraith it may have been." "If it was _your_ wraith, Saunders, it wasna the wraith o' a _timmer-leg_? for there are the prints of ane to be seen till this blessed moment, amang the flowers o' the garden and the glawr of the lane. Tam Clink will vouch for this as well as me, for he saw you too."