The house had once more become still. The crowd of people who had so suddenly taken possession of it had surged away. No one knew how it was that Mr Logan and his daughter and the lady who was going to be his wife had appeared in that strange scene, and no one noted how at least the last-named person disappeared. One moment she was kneeling on the floor, in wild fits of convulsive weeping, her hat pushed back from her head, her light hair hanging loose, wholly lost in trouble and distress: the next she was gone. She had indeed stolen away in the commotion caused by the arrival of the doctor, when Mrs Ogilvy was taken away, and that tragic obstruction removed from the doorway. It is to be supposed that she had come to herself by that time. She managed to steal out unseen, though with a shudder crossing the threshold where Lew had lain. It was she doubly, both in her betrayal of him, and in her exasperation of him, who was the cause of all; but probably she did not realise that. She found her way somehow through the moonlight and the black shadows, along the road all slippery with the recent rain, to her own house, and there spent the night as best she might, packing up many things which she prized, clothes and trinkets, and the _bibelots_, which in their fashion and hers, she loved like her betters. And early in the morning, by the first train, she went away--to Edinburgh, in the first place, and Eskholm saw her no more. When the doctor’s ministrations were over, for which Mr Logan waited to hear the result, the minister went into all the rooms looking for her. He had thought she was helping Susie at first; then, that she had retired somewhere in the excess of her feelings, which were more exquisite and delicate than those of common folk. He had in the excitement of the time never thought of as yet, or even begun to wonder at, the position she had assumed here, and the part she had taken. He knew that if his Elizabeth had a fault, it was that she liked to be always in the front, taking a foremost place in everything. He waited as long as he could, looking about everywhere; and then, when he was quite sure she was not to be found, and saw the doctor starting on his walk home, took his hat and went also. “You think it will not be fatal, doctor?” “It may not be--I cannot answer for anything. She’s very quiet, which is much in her favour. But how, in the name of all that is wonderful, did I find a dead man, whom I never saw in life, lying across the doorsteps of the Hewan, and a quiet old lady like Mrs Ogilvy struck almost to death with a pistol-shot?”