er sister Anne's parting look, and
now, strive as she would, she could not resist the conviction that it
was hovering over Joanna Crawfurd's face. Mrs. Jardine, like the Laird
of the Ewes, could have cried, "Pray do not smile, girl; you do not know
how you look; we, the initiated, have not stony enough hearts to stand
that." Mrs. Jardine was surprised that Harry could be so foolish as to
redden and appear displeased at Joanna Crawfurd's gaiety.

Mrs. Jardine almost complained against Providence that she was condemned
to punish her only child. Then she could not help speculating whether,
if by some unimaginable arrangement of events, she had been the
sufferer, and Harry's father had been spared to him, he would have
denied Harry his happiness in the name of her memory, and from a sense
of righteous animosity, whether, if she could have looked down purified
and peaceful from the spirit-world, she would have desired the
sacrifice, and whether she would not have pleaded against it for love
and mercy's sake?

The winter was gone, the early spring was at hand, and all around the
outskirts of the moor, like an incense to spring and the Lord of the
spring, rose the smoke of the whin burnings which were to clear the
ground for the sweet young grass, to employ the nibbling teeth of
hundreds on hundreds of sheep and lambs. Joanna Crawfurd had never so
sighed for spring, never sat in such passive inertness (highly
provocative to Lilias), receiving and realizing what it brought to her.

But the period of listlessness and inaction, life-long to some, was
nearly ended for this pair. With the last snowdrops of the garden in
February, and the first glinting gowans of the lea in March, came the
news to the country-side of the bankruptcy of one of the first of the
chain of banks, whose defalcations have accomplished more in causing
property to change hands than the lances of the moss-troopers. The young
Laird of Whitethorn held money in the shape of his father's shares in
one of those unlucky banks; and so it fell upon him one morning like a
clap of thunder that he was responsible for about as much as the acres
of Whitethorn would retrieve, besides the trifling morsel to whet his
appetite in the loss of his loose thousands. Harry Jardine was likely to
know himself as "landless, landless," as ever a proscribed Macgregor.

Harry rose to the encounter. "I am sorry for you, mother, and I do not
pretend that I shall not regret the old moorl