He looked at her for a moment, half impressed; but the glamour soon went out of Robert’s eyes. The reality was a very quiet feeble old woman, with the strength of a mouse, with a flash of high spirit such as he knew of old his mother possessed, and a voice that shook even while it pronounced this defiance of every evil thing. Short work would be made with that. He could remember scenes in which other old women had tried to protect their belongings, and short work had been made with them. He had never, never laid a finger on one himself. If he had ever dared to make his penitence, and could have disentangled his own story from that of those among whom he was, it might have been seen how little real guilt there ever was in his disorderly wretched life; but he could not disentangle it, even to himself: he felt himself guilty of many things in which he had had no share. Even in the confusion of the remorse that sometimes came upon him, he believed himself to have executed orders which were never given to him. The only thing he was not doubtful about was where these orders came from, and that if the same voice spoke them again suddenly at any moment, it would be his immediate impulse to obey. And after this he took up the ‘Scotsman,’--that honest peaceable paper, with its clever articles, and its local records, and consciousness of the metropolitan dignity which has paled a little in the hurry and flash of the times--the paper that goes to every Scotsman’s heart, whatever may be his politics, throughout the world, which everywhere, even in busy London, compatriots will offer to each other as something always dear. Wild as his life had been, and distracted as he now was, the sight and the sound of the ‘Scotsman’ was grateful to Robert Ogilvy. The paper in his hands not only shielded his face from observation, but gradually calmed him down, drew back his interest, and, wonder of wonders, occupied his mind. He had himself said he could always read. After this scene, with its half revelation and its overmastering dread, he in a few minutes read the ‘Scotsman’ as if there had been neither crime nor punishment in the world. And Mrs Ogilvy had already taken up her knitting; but what was in her heart, still throbbing and aching with the energy of that outburst, and how much less quickly the high tide died down, I will not venture to say. CHAPTER X.