titions.
Exultation would be a poor word wherewith to represent the madness
of the delight that shot its fires into Mistress Croale's eyes when
she saw the bottle actually abandoned within her reach. It was to
her as the very key of the universe. She darted upon it, put it to
her lips, and drank. Yet she took heed, thought while she drank,
and did not go beyond what she could carry. Little time such an
appropriation required. Noiselessly she set the bottle down, darted
into a closet containing a solitary calf, and there stood looking
from the open window in right innocent fashion, curiously
contemplating the raft attached to it, upon which she had seen the
highland woman arrive with her children.

At supper-time she was missing altogether. Nobody could with
certainty say when he had last seen her. The house was searched
from top to bottom, and the conclusion arrived at was, that she must
have fallen from some window and been drowned--only, surely she
would at least have uttered one cry! Examining certain of the
windows to know whether she might not have left some sign of such an
exit, the farmer discovered that the brander was gone.

"Losh!" cried the orra man, with a face bewildered to shapelessness,
like that of an old moon rising in a fog, "yon'll be her I saw an
hoor ago, hyne doon the water!"

"Ye muckle gowk!" said his master, "hoo cud she win sae far ohn gane
to the boddom?"

"Upo' the bran'er, sir," answered the orra man. "I tuik her for a
muckle dog upon a door. The wife maun be a witch!"

John Duff stared at the man with his mouth open, and for half a
minute all were dumb. The thing was incredible, yet hardly to be
controverted. The woman was gone, the raft was gone, and something
strange that might be the two together had been observed about the
time, as near as they could judge, when she ceased to be observed in
the house. Had the farmer noted the change in the level of the
whisky in his bottle, he might have been surer of it--except indeed
the doubt had then arisen whether they might not rather find her at
the foot of the stair when the water subsided.

Mr. Duff said the luck changed with the return of Snowball; his
sister said, with the departure of the beggar-wife. Before dark the
rain had ceased, and it became evident that the water had not risen
for the last half-hour. In two hours more it had sunk a quarter of
an inch.

Gibbie threw himself on the floor beside his mother's ch