stern language of eager passion--"I am a fool,"
she said, "to spend my words upon an idle, poor-spirited, unintelligent
boy, who crouches like a hound to the lash. Wait here, and receive your
taskmasters, and abide your chastisement at their hands; but do not
think your mother's eyes will behold it. I could not see it and live. My
eyes have looked often upon death, but never upon dishonour. Farewell,
Hamish! We never meet again."

She dashed from the hut like a lapwing, and perhaps for the moment
actually entertained the purpose which she expressed, of parting with
her son for ever. A fearful sight she would have been that evening
to any who might have met her wandering through the wilderness like a
restless spirit, and speaking to herself in language which will endure
no translation. She rambled for hours, seeking rather than shunning the
most dangerous paths. The precarious track through the morass, the dizzy
path along the edge of the precipice or by the banks of the gulfing
river, were the roads which, far from avoiding, she sought with
eagerness, and traversed with reckless haste. But the courage arising
from despair was the means of saving the life which (though deliberate
suicide was rarely practised in the Highlands) she was perhaps desirous
of terminating. Her step on the verge of the precipice was firm as that
of the wild goat. Her eye, in that state of excitation, was so keen as
to discern, even amid darkness, the perils which noon would not have
enabled a stranger to avoid.

Elspat's course was not directly forward, else she had soon been far
from the bothy in which she had left her son. It was circuitous, for
that hut was the centre to which her heartstrings were chained, and
though she wandered around it, she felt it impossible to leave the
vicinity. With the first beams of morning she returned to the hut.
Awhile she paused at the wattled door, as if ashamed that lingering
fondness should have brought her back to the spot which she had left
with the purpose of never returning; but there was yet more of fear
and anxiety in her hesitation--of anxiety, lest her fair-haired son had
suffered from the effects of her potion--of fear, lest his enemies had
come upon him in the night. She opened the door of the hut gently, and
entered with noiseless step. Exhausted with his sorrow and anxiety, and
not entirely relieved perhaps from the influence of the powerful opiate,
Hamish Bean again slept the stern, sound slee