It took nearly a month for a letter from Scotland to reach Madrid, and Gilbert had asked a friend who lived near to take charge of such correspondence as might come for him within a fortnight of his return from Granada. He had only reached home late on the previous night, and he was now expecting the packet to be brought to him. He had slept long, being tired, and when he emerged from his room the sun was brilliant. He walked out on the whitewashed veranda which ran round the upper story of the house, and looked out on the March landscape which the almond-blossom was already decorating. The ground sloped away before him, and, on the north-west, the Sierra de Guardarama cut into the sky. The pomegranates had not yet begun to flower, but a bush which stood near the walls cast the shadow of its leaves and stems against the glaring white. In Scotland, the buds would scarcely yet be formed on the trees; but the air would be full of the fresh smell of earth and that stir of life, that first invisible undercurrent of which the body is conscious through a certain sixth sense, would be vibrating. The Lour would be running hard and the spring tides setting up the coast. He stood looking, with fixed eyes, across the almond-blossom to a far-off country that he saw lying, wide and gray, in the north, with its sea-voice calling, calling. His servant’s footstep behind him on the stones made him turn; he was holding out a little packet of letters. ‘These have been sent from Don Balthazar’s house,’ said the man, in Spanish, indicating a few tied together with string. ‘The others were at the mail-office this morning.’ Gilbert sat down on the parapet of the veranda and turned over the letters; those that had come from his friend’s house must have been awaiting him a week, possibly longer. There were two which interested him, one from Miss Hersey and one directed in a hand he had seen before but could not now identify; it was writing that he connected with Scotland. Miss Robertson’s letter was among those which Don Balthazar had kept and he opened it first. The old lady generally reserved any tidings of Cecilia for the last paragraph and he forced himself to read steadily from the beginning; for, like many high-strung people, he found an odd attraction in such little bits of self-torture. Half-way down the last sheet he dropped the paper as though he were shot and the blood ran to his face in a wave. It contained the news of Cecilia Raeburn’s engagement; she was to marry Crauford Fordyce, and the wedding was fixed for the middle of April. He seized the letter again and glutted his eyes with the hateful words. ‘You will cease to fret about her now,’ concluded Miss Hersey simply, ‘and that will be a good thing. I hear they are to live on a property which belongs to Sir Thomas Fordyce in Roxburghshire. See and get you a wife somewhere else, dear Gilbert, but not a Papist. Caroline and I would think very ill of that.’