d like a deity over the
strands of that intrigue which was to shatter him before the summer
waned.

CHAPTER VIII

A NOCTURNAL VISIT

Kirstie had many causes of distress. More and more as we grow old--and
yet more and more as we grow old and are women, frozen by the fear of
age--we come to rely on the voice as the single outlet of the soul. Only
thus, in the curtailment of our means, can we relieve the straitened cry
of the passion within us; only thus, in the bitter and sensitive shyness
of advancing years, can we maintain relations with those vivacious
figures of the young that still show before us and tend daily to become
no more than the moving wall-paper of life. Talk is the last link, the
last relation. But with the end of the conversation, when the voice
stops and the bright face of the listener is turned away, solitude falls
again on the bruised heart. Kirstie had lost her "cannie hour at e'en";
she could no more wander with Archie, a ghost if you will, but a happy
ghost, in fields Elysian. And to her it was as if the whole world had
fallen silent; to him, but an unremarkable change of amusements. And she
raged to know it. The effervescency of her passionate and irritable
nature rose within her at times to bursting point.

This is the price paid by age for unseasonable ardours of feeling. It
must have been so for Kirstie at any time when the occasion chanced; but
it so fell out that she was deprived of this delight in the hour when
she had most need of it, when she had most to say, most to ask, and when
she trembled to recognise her sovereignty not merely in abeyance but
annulled. For, with the clairvoyance of a genuine love, she had pierced
the mystery that had so long embarrassed Frank. She was conscious, even
before it was carried out, even on that Sunday night when it began, of
an invasion of her rights; and a voice told her the invader's name.
Since then, by arts, by accident, by small things observed, and by the
general drift of Archie's humour, she had passed beyond all possibility
of doubt. With a sense of justice that Lord Hermiston might have envied,
she had that day in church considered and admitted the attractions of
the younger Kirstie; and with the profound humanity and sentimentality
of her nature, she had recognised the coming of fate. Not thus would she
have chosen. She had seen, in imagination, Archie wedded to some tall,
powerful, and rosy heroine of the golden locks, made in her ow