For the first few days after the shock, he went wandering about his fields, muttering ceaselessly to himself, and wringing his hands. His whole faculties seemed locked up in a feeling of bewilderment and terror, and every packet of letters which the postman brought him--letters urging the claims of angry creditors, or intimating the dishonour of bills--added to his distress. His son was in hiding no one knew where; and though it was perhaps well that he should have kept out of the way at such a time, poor Isabel could not help feeling that it was unkind. He might surely be able to do something, she thought, to lighten the distress of which he had been so entirely the cause, were it but to tell them what course yet remained for them to pursue. It was in vain that, almost broken-hearted herself, she strove by soothing the old man to restore him to himself: he remained melancholy and abstracted as at first, as if the suddenness of his ruin had deprived him of his faculties. He hardly ever spoke, took scarce any food during the day, and scarce any sleep during the night; and, finally, taking to his bed, he died after a few days’ illness--died of a broken heart. On the evening after the interment, his son John Rose, the carpenter, arrived from Glasgow, and found his mother sitting alone in the farmhouse, wholly overwhelmed with grief for the loss of her husband, and the utter ruin which she saw closing around her. Their meeting was a sad one; but after the widow’s first burst of sorrow was over, her son strove to comfort her, and in part succeeded. She might yet look forward, he said, to better days. He was in rather easy circumstances, employing about half-a-dozen workmen, and at times finding use for more. And though he could not well be absent from them, he would remain with her until he saw how far it was possible to wind up his father’s affairs, and she would then go with him, and find what he trusted she should deem a comfortable home in Glasgow. Isabel was soothed by his kindness; but it did not escape the anxious eye of the mother, that her son, at one time so robust and strong, had grown thin, and pale, and hollow-eyed, like a person in the latter stages of consumption, and that, though he seemed anxious to appear otherwise, he was evidently much exhausted by his journey. He rallied, however, on the following day. The sale of his father’s effects was coming on in about a week; and as the farmhouse at such a time could be no comfortable home for the widow, he brought her with him across the Firth to her sister’s in Cromarty, and then returned to Minitarf.