have cared, and you might have gone in. Only--" His voice failed him.

"Don't worry a mite about it," said Miss Bethia, with unwonted
gentleness. "It don't matter--and it is to you your mother must look
now."

But this was more than David could bear. Shaking himself free from her
detaining hand, he rushed away out of sight--out of the house--to the
hay-loft, the only place where he could hope to be alone. And he was
not alone there; for the first thing he heard when the sound of his own
sobbing would let him hear anything, was the voice of some one crying by
his side.

"Is it you, Jem?" asked he, softly.

"Yes, Davie."

And though they lay there a long time in the darkness, they did not
speak another word till they went into the house again.

But there is no use dwelling on all these sorrowful days. The last one
came, and they all went to the church together, and then to the grave.
Standing on the withered grass, from which the spring sunshine was
beginning to melt the winter snow, they listened to the saddest sound
that can fall on children's ears, the fall of the clods on their
father's coffin-lid, and then they went back to the empty house to begin
life all over again without their father's care.

CHAPTER SEVEN.

Mr Oswald, Frank's father, came home with them. He had been written to
when Mr Inglis died, and had reached Gourlay the day before the
funeral, but he had not stayed at their house, and they had hardly seen
him till now. They were not likely to see much of him yet, for he was a
man with much business and many cares, and almost the first words he
said when he came into the house, were, that he must leave for home that
night, or at the latest the next morning.

"And that means whatever you want to say to me, must be said at once,
and the sooner the better," said Miss Bethia, as she took Mrs Inglis's
heavy crape bonnet and laid it carefully in one of the deep drawers of
the bureau in her room. "I haven't the least doubt but I know what he
ought to say, and what she ought to say, better than they know
themselves. But that's nothing. It ain't the right one that's put in
the right spot, not more than once in ten times--at least it don't look
like it," added she, with an uncomfortable feeling that if any one were
to know her thoughts he might accuse her of casting some reflections on
the Providential arrangement of affairs. "They don't realise that I
could help them any, and it will suit