“Marget, my woman, you’ll be pleased to hear--I’ve heard from my son,” said the Mistress, with unusual graciousness. She came and stood in front of the fire, waiting to be questioned, and the fire light still shone with a very prismatic radiance through the Mistress’s eyelashes, careful though she had been, before she entered, to remove the dew from her eyes. “You’re no’ meaning Mr. Huntley? Eh! bless him! has he won there?” cried Marget, letting down her kilted gown, and hastening forward. And then the Mistress was tempted to draw forth her letter, and read “a bit here and a bit there,” which the faithful servant received with sobs and exclamations. “Bless the laddie, he minds every single thing at Norlaw--even the like of me!” cried Marget; upon which the Mistress rose again from the seat she had taken, with a little start of impatience:-- “Wherefore should he no’ mind you?--you’ve been about the house a’ his life; and I hope I’ll never live to see the day when a bairn of mine forgets his hame and auld friends! It’s time to bar the door, and put up the shutter. You should have had a’ done, and your fire gathered by this time; but it’s a bonnie night!” “’Deed, ay!” said Marget to herself, when Huntley’s mother had once more joined Cosmo in the dining-room; “the bonniest night that’s been to her this mony a month, though she’ll no’ let on--as if I didna ken how her heart yearns to that laddie on the sea, blessings on him! Eh, sirs! to think o’ thae very stars shining on the auld castle and the young laird, though the world itsel’s between the twa--and the guid hand of Providence ower a’--God be thanked!--to bring the bairn hame!” When the Mistress returned to the dining-parlor, she found Cosmo quite absorbed with another letter. The lad’s face was flushed with half-abashed pleasure, and a smile, shy, but triumphant, was on his lip. It was not Patie’s periodical letter, which still lay unopened before her own chair, where it had been left in the overpowering interest of Huntley’s. The Mistress was not perfectly pleased. To care for what anybody else might write--“one of his student lads, nae doubt, or some other fremd person,” in presence of the first letter from Huntley, was almost a slight to her first-born. “You’re strange creatures, you laddies,” said the Mistress. “I dinna understand you, for my part. There are you, Cosmo Livingstone, as pleased about your nonsense letter, whatever it may be, as if there was no such person as my Huntley in the world--him that aye made such a wark about you!” “This is not a nonsense letter--will you read it, mother?” said Cosmo. “Me!--I havena lookit at Patie’s letter yet!” cried the Mistress, indignantly. “Do you think I’m a person to be diverted with what one callant writes to another? Hold your peace, bairn, and let me see what my son says.”