“Is it me that you call insane?” said ’Lizabeth. “Eh, if it was but me! But well I know what I’m saying.” Then the wild looks of all around her suddenly impressed the old woman, too much occupied hitherto to think what their looks meant. She turned round upon them with slowly awakening anxiety. “You’re looking strange at me,” she cried, “you’re all looking strange at me! What is this you’re saying that has happened to-day? Oh, my lad is mad!--he’s roaming the hills, and Dick after him; he does na know that he’s doing; he’s out of his senses; it’s no ill meaning. Lads, some of you tell me, I’m going distracted. What has happened to-day?” The change in her appearance was wonderful; her solemn stateliness and abstraction were gone. Here was something she did not know. The flush of anxiety came to her cheeks, her eyes contracted, her lips fell apart. “Tell me,” she said, “for the love of God!” No one moved. They looked at each other with pale, alarmed faces. How could they tell her? Geoff stepped forward and took her by the arm very gently. “Will you come with me?” he said. “Something has happened; something that will grieve you deeply. I--I promised Dick to tell you, but not here. Won’t you come with me?” She drew herself out of his grasp with some impatience. “There’s been some new trouble,” she said to herself--“some new trouble! No doubt more violence. Oh, God, forgive him; but he does not know what he’s doing. It’s you, my young lord?--you know it’s true what I’ve been saying. But this new trouble, what is it?--more blood? Oh, tell me the worst; I can bear it all, say, even if he was dead.” “’Lizabeth,” said Geoff, with tears in his eyes--and again everybody looked on as at a tragedy--“you are a brave woman; you have borne a great deal in your life. He is dead; but that is not all.” She did not note, nor perhaps hear, the last words. How should she? The first was enough. She stood still in the midst of them, all gazing at her, with her hands clasped before her. For a moment she said nothing. The last drop of blood seemed to ebb from her brown cheeks. Then she raised her face upward, with a smile upon it. “The Lord God be praised,” she said; “He’s taken my lad before me.” And when they brought to her the seat she had rejected, ’Lizabeth allowed herself to be placed upon it. The extreme tension of both body and mind seemed to have relaxed. The look of tragic endurance left her face. A softened aspect of suffering, a kind of faint smile, like a wan sunbeam, stole over it. The moisture came to her strained eyes. “Gone? Is he gone at last? On the hill-side was it?--in some wild corner, where none but God could be near, not his mother? And me that was dreading and dreading I would be taken first; for who would have patience like his mother? But after all, you know, neighbours, the father comes foremost; and had more to do with him--more to do with him--than even me.”