both for a while--then the preacher spoke.

"Other communications may have since reached her from the same
quarter," he said.

"That is impossible," rejoined the laird.

"I don't know that," insisted Fergus. "There is a foolish--a
half-silly companion of his about the town. They call him Sir
Gibbie Galbraith."

"Jenny knows no such person."

"Indeed she does. I have seen them together."

"Oh! you mean the lad the minister adopted! the urchin he took off
the streets!--Sir Gibbie Galbraith!" he repeated sneeringly, but as
one reflecting. "--I do vaguely recall a slanderous rumour in which
a certain female connection of the family was hinted at.--Yes!
that's where the nickname comes from.--And you think she keeps up a
communication with the clown through him?"

"I don't say that, sir. I merely think it possible she may see this
Gibbie occasionally; and I know he worships the cow-boy: it is a
positive feature of his foolishness, and I wish it were the worst."

Therewith he told what he heard from Miss Kimble, and what he had
seen for himself on the night when he watched Gibbie.

"Her very blood must be tainted!" said her father to himself, but
added, "--from her mother's side;" and his attacks upon her after
this were at least diurnal. It was a relief to his feeling of
having wronged her, to abuse her with justice. For a while she
tried hard to convince him now that this now that that notion of her
conduct, or of Gibbie's or Donal's, was mistaken: he would listen to
nothing she said, continually insisting that the only amends for her
past was to marry according to his wishes; to give up superstition,
and poetry, and cow-boys, and dumb rascals, and settle down into a
respectable matron, a comfort to the gray hairs she was now bringing
with sorrow to the grave. Then Ginevra became absolutely silent; he
had taught her that any reply was but a new start for his
objurgation, a knife wherewith to puncture a fresh gall-bladder of
abuse. He stormed at her for her sullenness, but she persisted in
her silence, sorely distressed to find how dead her heart seemed
growing under his treatment of her: what would at one time have made
her utterly miserable, now passed over her as one of the billows of
a trouble that had to be borne, as one of the throbs of a headache,
drawing from her scarcely a sigh. She did not understand that, her
heaven being dark, she could see no individual cloud against it,
that, her em