Poll's. And I want to ask of you as a friend whether you like the

prospect? There are two horns to your dilemma, and I must say for
myself I should look mighty ruefully on either. Do you see yourself

explaining to the four Black Brothers? or do you see yourself presenting
the milkmaid to papa as the future lady of Hermiston? Do you? I tell

you plainly, I don't!"
Archie rose. "I will hear no more of this," he said, in a trembling

voice.
But Frank again held up his cigar. "Tell me one thing first. Tell me

if this is not a friend's part that I am playing?"
"I believe you think it so," replied Archle. "I can go as far as that.

I can do so much justice to your motives. But I will hear no more of
it. I am going to bed."

"That's right, Weir," said Frank heartily. "Go to bed and think over
it; and I say, man, don't forget your prayers! I don't often do the

moral - don't go in for that sort of thing - but when I do there's one
thing sure, that I mean it."

So Archie marched off to bed, and Frank sat alone by the table for
another hour or so, smiling to himself richly. There was nothing

vindictive in his nature; but, if revenge came in his way, it might as
well be good, and the thought of Archie's pillow reflections that night

was indescribably sweet to him. He felt a pleasant sense of power. He
looked down on Archie as on a very little boy whose strings he pulled -

as on a horse whom he had backed and bridled by sheer power of
intelligence, and whom he might ride to glory or the grave at pleasure.

Which was it to be? He lingered long, relishing the details of schemes
that he was too idle to pursue. Poor cork upon a torrent, he tasted

that night the sweets of omnipotence, and brooded like a deity over the
strands of that intrigue which was to shatter him before the summer

waned.
CHAPTER VIII - A NOCTURNAL VISIT

KIRSTIE had many causes of distress. More and more as we grow old - and
yet more and more as we grow old and are women, frozen by the fear of

age - we come to rely on the voice as the single outlet of the soul.
Only thus, in the curtailment of our means, can we relieve the

straitened cry of the passion within us; only thus, in the bitter and
sensitive shyness of advancing years, can we maintain relations with

those vivacious figures of the young that still show before us and tend
daily to become no more than the moving wall-paper of life. Talk is the

last link, the last relation. But with the end of the conversation,
when the voice stops and the bright face of the listener is turned away,

solitude falls again on the bruised heart. Kirstie had lost her "cannie
hour at e'en"; she could no more wander with Archie, a ghost if you

will, but a happy ghost, in fields Elysian. And to her it was as if the
whole world had fallen silent; to him, but an unremarkable change of

amusements. And she raged to know it. The effervescency of her
passionate and irritable nature rose within her at times to bursting

point.
This is the price paid by age for unseasonable ardours of feeling. It

must have been so for Kirstie at any time when the occasion chanced; but
it so fell out that she was deprived of this delight in the hour when

she had most need of it, when she had most to say, most to ask, and when
she trembled to recognise her sovereignty not merely in abeyance but

annulled. For, with the clairvoyance of a genuine love, she had pierced
the mystery that had so long embarrassed Frank. She was conscious, even

before it was carried out, even on that Sunday night when it began, of
an invasion of her rights; and a voice told her the invader's name.

Since then, by arts, by accident, by small things observed, and by the
general drift of Archie's humour, she had passed beyond all possibility

of doubt. With a sense of justice that Lord Hermiston might have
envied, she had that day in church considered and admitted the

attractions of the younger Kirstie; and with the profoundhumanity and
sentimentality of her nature, she had recognised the coming of fate.

Not thus would she have chosen. She had seen, in imagination, Archie
wedded to some tall, powerful, and rosy heroine of the golden locks,

made in her own image, for whom she would have strewed the bride-bed
with delight; and now she could have wept to see the ambition falsified.

But the gods had pronounced, and her doom was otherwise.
She lay tossing in bed that night, besieged with feverish thoughts.

There were dangerous matters pending, a battle was toward, over the fate
of which she hung in jealousy, sympathy, fear, and alternateloyalty and

disloyalty to either side. Now she was reincarnated in her niece, and
now in Archie. Now she saw, through the girl's eyes, the youth on his

knees to her, heard his persuasive instances with a deadlyweakness, and
received his overmastering caresses. Anon, with a revulsion, her temper

raged to see such utmost favours of fortune and love squandered on a
brat of a girl, one of her own house, using her own name - a deadly

ingredient - and that "didna ken her ain mind an' was as black's your
hat." Now she trembled lest her deity should plead in vain, loving the

idea of success for him like a triumph of nature; anon, with returning
loyalty to her own family and sex, she trembled for Kirstie and the

credit of the Elliotts. And again she had a vision of herself, the day
over for her old-world tales and local gossip, bidding farewell to her

last link with life and brightness and love; and behind and beyond, she
saw but the blank butt-end where she must crawl to die. Had she then

come to the lees? she, so great, so beautiful, with a heart as fresh as
a girl's and strong as womanhood? It could not be, and yet it was so;

and for a moment her bed was horrible to her as the sides of the grave.
And she looked forward over a waste of hours, and saw herself go on to

rage, and tremble, and be softened, and rage again, until the day came
and the labours of the day must be renewed.

Suddenly she heard feet on the stairs - his feet, and soon after the
sound of a window-sash flung open. She sat up with her heart beating.

He had gone to his room alone, and he had not gone to bed. She might
again have one of her night cracks; and at the entrancing prospect, a

change came over her mind; with the approach of this hope of pleasure,
all the baser metal became immediately obliterated from her thoughts.

She rose, all woman, and all the best of woman, tender, pitiful, hating
the wrong, loyal to her own sex - and all the weakest of that dear

miscellany, nourishing, cherishing next her soft heart, voicelessly
flattering, hopes that she would have died sooner than have

acknowledged. She tore off her nightcap, and her hair fell about her
shoulders in profusion. Undying coquetry awoke. By the faint light of

her nocturnal rush, she stood before the looking-glass, carried her
shapely arms above her head, and gathered up the treasures of her

tresses. She was never backward to admire herself; that kind of modesty
was a stranger to her nature; and she paused, struck with a pleased

wonder at the sight. "Ye daft auld wife!" she said, answering a thought
that was not; and she blushed with the innocentconsciousness of a

child. Hastily she did up the massive and shining coils, hastily donned
a wrapper, and with the rushlight in her hand, stole into the hall.

Below stairs she heard the clock ticking the deliberate seconds, and
Frank jingling with the decanters in the dining-room. Aversion rose in

her, bitter and momentary. "Nesty, tippling puggy!" she thought; and
the next moment she had knocked guardedly at Archie's door and was

bidden enter.
Archie had been looking out into the ancient blackness, pierced here and

there with a rayless star; taking the sweet air of the moors and the
night into his bosom deeply; seeking, perhaps finding, peace after the

manner of the unhappy. He turned round as she came in, and showed her a
pale face against the window-frame.

"Is that you, Kirstie?" he asked. "Come in!"
"It's unco late, my dear," said Kirstie, affecting unwillingness.

"No, no," he answered, "not at all. Come in, if you want a crack. I am
not sleepy, God knows!"

She advanced, took a chair by the toilet table and the candle, and set
the rushlight at her foot. Something - it might be in the comparative

disorder of her dress, it might be the emotion that now welled in her
bosom - had touched her with a wand of transformation, and she seemed