When one struck on the big kitchen clock, with an ominous sound like a knell, Janet, trying to reduce her big step to an inaudible footfall, came “ben” again. She found her mistress sitting still idly as if she were dead, the lamp burning solemnly, not the sound even of a breath in the room. “No stocking in her hands, not even reading a book,” Janet said. For a moment, indeed, with a quick impulse of fear, the woman thought that Mrs Ogilvy had died in the new catastrophe. “Oh, mem, mem!” she cried, and in an instant there was a faint stir. “Well, Janet,” Mrs Ogilvy said in a stifled voice. “Will ye sit up longer? A’ the trains are passed, and long passed. He will be coming in the morning; he must just--have missed the last.” “I am not going to my bed just yet,” the mistress said. “But, mem, you will be worn out. You have just had no meat and no sleep and no rest, and you’ll be weariet to death.” “And what would it matter if I was?” she answered, with a faint smile. “Oh, dinna say that; how can we tell what may be wanted of you, and needing a’ your strength?” Mrs Ogilvy roused herself at these words. “And that’s quite true,” she said. “You have more sense than anybody would expect; you are a lesson to me, that have had plenty reason to know better. But, nevertheless, I will not go to my bed yet--not just yet. I can get a good sleep in this chair.” “With the window open, mem, in the dead of the night, after all Mr Robert said!” “Do you call that the dead of the night?” said the mistress. And the two women looked out silenced in the great hush and awe of that pause of nature between the night and the day. It was like no light that ever was on sea or land, though it _is_ daily, nightly, for watchers and sleepless souls. It was lovely and awful--a light in which everything hidden in the dark came to life again, like the light alone of the watchful eyes of Him who slumbereth not nor sleeps. They felt Him contemplating them and their troubles, knowing what was to come of them, which they did not, from the skies--and their hearts were hushed within them: there was silence for a moment, the profound silence that reigned out and in, in which they were as the trees. Then Mrs Ogilvy started and cried, “What is that?” Was it anything at all? There are sounds that enhance the silence, just as there are discords that increase the harmony of music--sounds of insects stirring in their sleep, of leaves falling, of a grain of sand losing its balance and rolling over on the way. Janet heard nothing. She shook her head in her big white cap. And then suddenly her mistress gripped her with a force that no one could have suspected to be in those soft old hands. “Now, listen! There’s somebody on the road, there’s somebody at the gate!”