The Bride Elect: or, The Doom of the Double Roses — page 145: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

136 THE BRIDE ELECT. are. Kilmeny, there’s no one of them cares where ye are, or would come this distance to see you. You'll see.’ My lady looked at him. Perhaps a wild doubt started just then through her soul, for she gasped and clenched one hand hard upon her heart. ““T won’t believe it—I won’t!” she cried, almost plead- ingly. ‘Now, my lady,” said Tyndale Strathmore, with a cun- ning look, ‘‘what’s the use of building so much of your bonnie heart on a feckless auld orandfather and a doited auld grandmother, who ez With a curl of the lip my lady wheeled from him, may- hap with a prescience of a third presence, for the messenger was standing behind her alone. ‘‘There was no passenger for my Lady of Strathmore,” said Robin, with downcast eyes. ‘‘ The people who came - to-day were all from Nairn, and have gone up to the Ork- neys. Don’t despair, though, Cousin Kilmeny; we'll go up to the post-office; the mails are opened by now.” “Yes, we'll try the post-office,” echoed the laird, twisting his gray mustaches and quietly smiling. With a quiet, almost bewildered look back at the hissing steamer, and the shouting crowd, Lady Kilmeny followed her escorts off the pier up the smoky street and down a noisy thoroughfare to the post-office, and ere they stopped _ before the door, the postmaster came out with a letter in his hand which, with a low reverence to the lady of Strathmore, he delivered to her. — She looked at it, and she looked in the pitiless face of her crafty kinsman with a faint, anguished smile of attempted triumph, and she turned to the anxious, sympathetic face of her Cousin Robin as if for some small support, and then she toyed with the sealed initials on the envelope. Without a word the laird led the way out of Golspie to the steep, ascending shore-road toward home, and his silent companions followed mechanically, Then ‘T'yndale Strath- more glanced once at his niece’s still face and tightened the reins in his hand. ‘« Read it,” he said, then put spurs to his horse and left her undisturbed. Robin also, with uneasy glances, deviated on to the Heaths ery moor, and lett my lady with her letter. 33 (E(o) Eomichooks