All this time Cosmo never said a word to his mother of Mary of Melmar; but he leaped up into the old window of the castle every evening to dream his dream, and a hundred times, in fancy, saw a visionary figure, pale, and lovely, and tender, coming home with him to claim her own. He, too, looked over the woods of Melmar as his brother had done, but with feelings very different--for no impulse of acquisition quickened in the breast of Cosmo. He thought of them as the burden of a romance, the chorus of a ballad--the inheritance to which the long lost Mary must return; and while the Mistress stocked his new portmanteau, and made ready his traveling wardrobe, the lad was hunting everywhere with ungrateful pertinacity for scraps of information to guide him in this search which his mother had not the most distant idea was the real motive of his journey. If she had known it, scarcely even the discovery of her husband’s longing after his lost love could have affected the Mistress with more overpowering bitterness and disgust. Marget shut the door when Cosmo came to question her on the subject, and made a vehement address to him under her breath. “Seek her, if you please,” said Marget, in a violent whisper; “but if your mother ever kens this--sending out her son into the world with a’ this pride and pains for _her_ sake--I’d rather the auld castle fell on our heads, Cosmo Livingstone, and crushed every ane of us under a different stane!” “Hush, Marget! my mother is not unjust,” said Cosmo, with some displeasure. “She’s no’ unjust; but she’ll no’ be second to a stranger woman that has been the vexation of her life,” said Marget, “spier where you like, laddie. Ye dinna ken, the like of you, how things sink into folks’ hearts, and bide for years. I ken naething about Mary of Melmar--neither her married name nor naught else--spier where ye like, but dinna spier at me.” But it did not make very much matter where Cosmo made inquiry. Never was disappearance more entire and complete than that of Mary of Melmar. He gathered various vague descriptions of her, not quite so poetical in sentiment as Jaacob’s, but quite as confusing. She was “a great toast among a’ the lads, and the bonniest woman in the country-side"--she was “as sweet as a May morning"--she was “neither big nor little, but just the best woman’s size"--she was, in short, every thing that was pretty, indefinite, and perplexing. And with no clue but this, Cosmo set out, on a windy August morning, on his travels, to improve his mind, and write for the _Auld Reekie Magazine_, as his mother thought--and to seek for the lost heir of the Huntleys, as he himself and the Laird of Melmar knew. CHAPTER XXXIX.