ld soon come to me, and that I should
be a lady. But my stepmother said awful things. I will not tell you
what! Even now her words cut me like a knife."

"Well," said the youth, "and what then?"

"Day after day I waited for a letter from him," she replied. "At first
I hadn't a doubt; he had promised me and I believed him. But when one
month had gone, and then two, I grew desperate."

"And he never wrote to you at all?" asked the youth.

"At the end of three months," she replied, "I got a letter."

"Yes"--and his voice was eager--"what did he say?"

"Here it is," she replied, and she passed him a crumpled piece of
paper. The envelope was stamped with a London post-mark, but the paper
within had no address of any sort. It simply contained the words:

"DEAR JEAN,--It cannot be helped now, and
of course we were never really married. It
was only a joke.--DOUGLAS."

"And that was all?" said the youth.

"That was all, God helping me, that was all."

"And you have heard nothing from him since?"

"Never a word since the morning he bid me good-bye at the station, and
told me to go back to my father, saying he would write to me at once,
and come to me soon. No, I have never seen nor heard of him since."

The eyes of the youth became red with anger. His hands clenched and
unclenched themselves passionately, but he did not speak. It seemed as
if he could not. Then an oath escaped him, and his voice was hoarse.

"But, mother," he cried presently, "tell me more. There must be more
than this. What about this marriage? Were there no witnesses? Have
you no marriage lines?"

"Things are different in Scotland, my boy," was her answer. "There
many people just take each other as man and wife, and that is all, and
the marriage is legal. Do you know"--and her voice trembled with
passion--"that on the afternoon when he took me as his wife we knelt
down by the roadside, and he prayed with me that God would help us to
be true man and wife to each other?"

"But, but----" he cried, and he was trembling with emotion, "and he
treated you like that?"

The woman did not reply, but looked away across the moors with a hard,
stony stare.

"My mother, my poor, poor mother!" He seemed incapable of saying more,
and for two or three minutes there was a silence between them.

"And then, mother?" he went on presently.

"Months later," she went on, "I was driven from home. I had no
friends, no relatives