o
more out of my window, I only sat on the stool by my bedside and kept my
face hid in the valances; and the little gray governess would sit beside
me and cheer me, and tell me it was not so bad when all was said, and
beauty was but little worth, and years would efface much, that my hair
was still as dark and soft, my eyes as shining, my----But all to what
use? Where had flown the old Strathsay red from my cheek, where that
smooth polish of brow, where----I, who had aye been the flower of the
race, the pride of the name, could not now bide to brook my own glance
in the glass.

But the worst of it all would be, I thought,--not recking the worse to
come,--when the girls flocked back. How I dreaded it, how I sought to
escape their mock and go home, poor fool! but the little gray governess
saw them all first, I must believe, for there was not a quip or a look
askance, and they treated me as bairns treat a lamb that has tint its
mother. And so seeing I had lost my fair skin, I put myself to gain
other things in its place, and worked hard at my stents, at my music, my
books. I grew accustomed to things, and would forget there had been a
change, and, being young, failed to miss the being bonny; and if I did
not miss it, who should? and they all were so kind, that the last year
of school was the happiest of the whole. Thus the time drew near my
eighteenth summer, and Miss Dunreddin had heard of a ship bound our
way from Glasgow, and we were to leave the town with all its rare old
histories, and speed through nights and days of seafaring to St. Anne's
by the water-side, to the old stone house with its windows overhanging
the River of the Cross.

So the old brig slid lazily up the river, beneath the high and beauteous
banks, and as between the puffs of wind we lay there in the mid-channel,
the mate,--a dark, hawk-eyed man, at whom Effie liked well to toss a
merry mock, and with whom, sometimes stealing up, she would pace the
deck in hours of fair weather,--a man whose face was like a rock that
once was smitten with sunshine, never since,--a sad man, with a wrathful
lip even when he spoke us fair,--the mate handed me his glass and bade
me look, while he went to the side and bent over there with Effie,
gazing down into the sun-brown, idle current. And I pointed it,--and
surely that was the old stone gable in its woodbines,--and surely, as
we crept nearer, the broad bower-window opened before me,--and surely a
lady sat there, a ha