Violet told her mother next morning of this nocturnal visit. She would rather, had she dared, have told Sandy, and kept it back from her mother, who was too angry in consequence of Val’s assault upon her son to do him full justice--but dared not, fearing her brother’s questions, to which she could give no answer. And then dead silence--one of those blank intervals of existence which are perhaps the hardest to bear--fell upon the poor little girl at the Hewan. When the rest of the family went back to Edinburgh, she begged to be allowed to stay behind for a day or two. I cannot tell for what reason, for probably Vi would have been less miserable at home among her brothers and her occupations. But at Vi’s age one does not wish to forget one’s misery--one prefers to take the full good of it. She secured that advantage, poor child! After the events, which had crowded on each other, came silence and stillness, so complete that they weighed upon her like a positive burden, not a mere negation of movement or sound. The long spring days, bright and cold--the long days of rain, when she stood at the window and watched the showers falling over the valley with all its trees, sometimes crossed by a sunbeam, and gleaming under it, but most frequently falling in a mist of moisture, dull, persistent, untouched by any light. Even the news of the village scarcely reached her, and nearly a week elapsed before Violet heard as a piece of public news that Mr Ross had been obliged to leave home on business--that he had not even been present at the great dinner at Castleton, which was given in honour of his election. But not even Mary Percival came up to the Hewan through the woods in that first week of silence, which almost killed Vi. They were all too angry, too deeply offended, and at the same time too anxious about Val, concerning whom Lady Eskside smiled and told stories of the urgent business which compelled his absence, but of whose whereabouts they knew nothing, and had heard nothing since the night when he went away. CHAPTER XXX.