“Miss Nora, cheer up,” said Nancy, crying, and laughing, and shivering with joy. “Dinna take it so sair to heart. It’s her nerves, my bonnie woman. But they’re a’ safe, noo, baith lads and men. It’s but the doctor--do ye no’ hear what they say?” Then Nora rose up desperate, and turned her stony face upon them. “Do you think there’s none to break their hearts for him?” she cried, with a wild indignation. “Do you think there’s no mother, no woman watching? Be silent, ye cruel women! How dare you tell me it’s only _him_?” Then they all looked at her with pathetic faces, gathering round her where she stood--she who did not know what she was saying. Impatiently she turned from their looks. What could sympathy or anything do for her? What did it matter? “Let me be!” she cried, as Nancy had cried. Let her alone! that was all she could say. “Eh, Miss Nora, if we had kent the doctor was onything to you!” cried one of the pitiful women. Nora turned round with a certain wild fierceness almost before the words were said. “And who said he was anything to me?” she asked, with a strange scorn of herself and them. He was nothing to her; she could not even wear black for him, or let anybody know she mourned. She shook herself clear of the pitying people, she could not tell how. Like a blind creature, seeing nothing, with an instinct only to get home anyhow, she went straight forward, not knowing where she placed her foot; and thus walked sightless, open-eyed, and miserable--into Willy Erskine’s arms.