With a fond, proud and yet sad smile he looked at the portrait of more than one fair ancestress, and thought, "The girl I left behind me is fairer than them all!" For in Montreal he had left Aurelia Darnel de St. Eustache, whom we shall meet in time. A kind of half-flirtation--something even more tender and taking had subsisted between them, and but for his sudden summons home, it would have assumed greater proportions and had a firmer basis; he would have explained to her the nature and extent of his love for her, and obtained some pledge or promise from her, with the consent of her mother, for father she had none now; and when Elspat Gorm spoke apprehensively of the 5th of August, as being "the fatal day of the Ruthvens," he would think, with a smile, "I hope not, as it was on the evening of that day, I first met Aurelia at our ball in Montreal! Would that I could tell the poor old man who is passing away, of my love, and gain his permission to address her; for she must know of my love for her and will await my return; but I would that he could see her, even as I in memory see her now!" And before him came a mental vision of a very beautiful girl, whose dark hair and long black lashes contrasted with the pale delicacy of her skin, her pencilled eyebrows rather straight than arched, a calm loveliness in her face when, in repose, but a brightness over it all, when she was animated, when her soft eyes lighted up and her lips became tremulous. "Aurelia!" he whispered to himself, and marvelled if the time would ever come, when he would bring her hither to be the queen of his life, and of beautiful Ardgowrie. Day by day, his father was sinking, and all the powers of medicine could do nothing for him; his ailment was not old age but a passing away of the powers of life. The old Highland housekeeper, Elspat, had much contempt for the nostrums of the doctor, and believing her master to be under the spell of a gipsy-woman whom he had sent to prison for theft, maintained that he would never be cured, until the parings of his finger nails and a lock of his hair were buried in the earth with a live cock, a remnant of ancient Paganrie, which the reign of Victoria still finds prevailing in some parts of the Highlands. So, as she fully expected, the morning of the 5th of August, saw the old Laird expire peacefully, after playing fatuously with the coverlet, and muttering that he could "hear the drums of the Royal beating the old Scots March," and the lamenting wail of Macaulay's pipe was heard on the terrace without, as Roland closed his father's eyes, and, crushed with natural grief, knelt by the side of his bed, and Elspat placed a plate containing a little salt on his breast.