This was a betrayal of all that Margaret had feared; Bell, too, was then of the same opinion. The poor girl stole to the door of her father’s room, and stood there for a moment listening to the easy flow of Mrs. Bellingham’s dogmas, and Grace’s sigh of “Dearest papa!” and she heard him laugh, and say something in his own natural tone. Would he laugh if he were--dying? “Come in, Miss Margret,” said John, coming through the dressing-room, this time with some extra pillows (for he might want to have his head higher, John thought). “Oh, I cannot-- I cannot bear it!” cried Margaret, turning away. He put his large old hand softly upon her arm. “My bonnie leddy!” he said. He would not have said it, Margaret felt, if there had been any hope. Then she went out in her despair, restless, not knowing where to seek relief from the pain in her heart, which was so sore, and which could not be shaken off. She said to herself that she could not bear it. It was her first experience of the intolerable. The fine weather had broken which had so favored the drawing, and the wind was moaning about the old house, prophesying rain. With another pang in her heart--not that she was thinking of Rob, but only of the contrast between that light-heartedness and her present despair, she stumbled through the potato furrows, past the place where she had spent so many pleasant hours, thinking no evil--though the evil she remembered must have been in existence all the same--and made her way into the wood. There was shelter there, and no one would see her. The trees were all vocal with those sighings of melancholy cadence that are never long absent from the Scotch fir-woods. The wind came sweeping over them, with one great sigh after another, like the waves of the sea: and she sighed, too, in heaviness. Oh, if she could but sigh deep enough, like the wind, to get that burden off her breast! Margaret sat down on a damp knoll, with all the firs rising up round her like a congregation of shadows, and the wind sweeping with long complaint, sadder and sadder over their melancholy branches: and gazed at the gray old house through her tears. How different it had looked in the morning sunshine, with her father sitting among his books, and no evil near! All the color and light had gone out of it now; it was gray as death, pale, solemn--the old tower and gables rising against a sky scarcely less gray than they were, the trees swaying wildly about, the clouds rolling together in masses across the colorless sky.