“Oh, sir,” cried Janet, “the human heart’s an awfu’ deceitful thing. I could find it in my heart to go down on my knees, and beg you--oh, for the Lord’s sake!--to go away before there’s any harm done from this misfortunate house.” “The woman’s daft!” cried Mr. Wedderburn. But it gave him a dazed and troubled look when he appeared in the drawing-room some time later. He was very silent all the rest of the evening, sometimes casting an almost furtive look round him from one face to another; sometimes red, sometimes pale. Once or twice he broke out into a curious laugh when there seemed little occasion for it. “I am afraid you have taken cold, Mr. Wedderburn; it was too late to be sitting out on an October night,” said Mrs. Dalyell. “I don’t think I’ve taken cold--but I think I’ll return to my room, with your kind permission, for I have some things to plan out,” said the lawyer. It was so unlike him that they all agreed something must be the matter. Had he got bad news? Had he been troubled about business? “Perhaps he had taken something that had disagreed with him,” Mrs. Dalyell suggested. Whatever it was, he was not like himself. No, he was very unlike himself. He gave a shame-faced look in the glass when he went to his room, and burst out into a low, long laugh. “I’m a pretty person!” he said to himself. And then he became suddenly grave--graver, almost, than he had ever been in all his serious life. CHAPTER VII. It was not until Fred Dalyell’s return from Oxford in the spring that he became aware of the rumour which had already begun to spread through the neighbourhood and to be discussed in the Edinburgh drawing-rooms, that his mother was about to marry again. He had seen when he returned home that the girls were a little overcast and subdued, and that there was a little flush as of uneasiness and embarrassment on Mrs. Dalyell’s face. It is difficult at first for a long absent member of a family coming back, to find such a cloud in the air, to discover whether this is only the moment of a storm, whether it means some trifling disagreement--for trifles become great in the inclosure of the household walls--or whether something important and fundamental is intimated by these restrained phrases and averted looks. He thought that perhaps there had been a “breeze,” that Susie was getting into the wilful stage, and, distracted by hopes and prospects of her own, had been opposing or defying her mother; that the tenants had been troublesome, backward on rent-day, or bothering about those eternal repairs, which he wondered that old Wedderburn could allow to worry his mother. But this did not seem enough to account for the visible but unexplained trouble in the house. When he caught Susie by the arm and drew her aside to ask, “What’s the matter?” she shook off his hand with a cry of “Oh, don’t ask me, Fred,” and escaped from him, leaving him more bewildered than ever. What could it