My father was a stern man, rough in his manner,
and despising all demonstrations of feeling.
He lived through his mill; he ate and drank for
his mill; he slept and often denied himself sleep
for his mill. He had married an heiress to bring
capital to his mill. Nothing had any interest for
him that did not in some way bear upon his
business. He was little at home except in the
evenings, when he pored over little books with
long lists of figures in them. It was because of
these little books that he liked his rooms so
hushed. He had hardly ever leisure to smile
over the edges of the pages at his daughter.

I fear I am speaking severely of my father,
and I desire to deal very gently with his memory.
I have since those days knelt at his death-bed,
and seen into his heart, which was then a sealed
book to me. But at that time he had never
shown much tenderness for me. He did not
understand girls, and he had not much patience
with them. His one son, my brother Dick, had
failed him at the mill, and turned soldier; and
besides the effects of this disappointment,
I believe his heart was kept sore by the memory of
my mother, who, gentle as she was, could never,
I think, have suited him as a wife.

But now we must hear Elspie, not speaking
aloud, but in whispers to herself, which were
overheard by me, Mattie, her nursling. She
said that my father hnd been harsh to his wife,
whom she, Elspie, had loved and served; had
quarrelled with her gentle ways and neglected
her. She muttered to herself, now in her old
age, of how she had gone down on her knees to
her young mistress in days gone by, and prayed
her not to marry Seth Gordon, for "ill would
come of it." And the ill had come. A lonely
life, a broken heart, an early grave; "and now,"
whispered Elspie, with her weird eyes gleaming
through tears under her shaggy white brows,
"an unquiet spirit, that would not be kept in
heaven, out would come pattering with wistful
feet down the Mill-house stairs, weeping in
the Mill-house chambers, bending at midnight
over the bedside of the beloved daughter, while
that daughter sobbed for sympathy in her sleep,
and the old woman, groaning to hear her, knelt
praying with uplifted hands in her bed that the
sorrowful spirit would trust the child to her and
take its rest.

Of these things Elspie muttered to herself as
she went hobbling about the Mill-house in her
clean white mob-cap and ancient gown of
Chinese-patterned print, or sat knitting in the
narrow small-paned window of the dim room that
had been my nursery. The housemaid dubbed
her "owl," and the cook called her "witch,"
and there were many besides these who said
that, if the Mill-house were haunted, it was all
Elspie's doing.

I have no very clear idea of what my own
character was when I ceased to be a child; but
I know that I was always either crushed with
gloom and despondency, or walking on tiptoe in
a state of unreasonable ecstasy. I believe I
was a musing, indolent girl, with eccentric
fancies and much passionate feeling. I had a
craving for joy, with a superstitious belief that
I should never be allowed to do more than just
taste it, and return to the bitters appointed for
me. Yet the tastes that I got were so sweet
that I was always seeking for them. In the
robust hunger of my youth I was constantly casting
about for little morsels, which I devoured
out of doors as birds feed on berries. Any
unfinished tit-bit was left upon the lintel when I
returned across the threshold of my home. I
used to fancy that the outside of the Mill-house
door was white, and the inside black; but it
was painted all the same. Very little gave me
pangs of delight—the pleasant purring noise
from the beetling-house, the splashing of the
mill-wheels, the humming of the bees, and the
smell of the roses in the high old garden. But
there was an ever-rising lump familiar to my
throat. As to my person, I was a good height
and womanly for my years. I cannot attempt
to describe my face, for I believe that in those
days it was as variable as my mind. I was pale
when gloomy, and rosy when glad. My eyes were
dark, and also my hair, which curled crisp and
soft when I was well, but, fell limp when I was sick.
"What ails you, child?" Miss Pollard would say;
"your hair is as straight as my apron-string!"

I was my father's only child, now that my
brother was dead. Dick had been a good deal
older than I, and very little with me except
during the holidays of his school years. Those
holidays had been the white bits of my life. I
had given as much love to this one as most
people have to divide amongst many. To obtain
him any trifling good I would have sat up a
whole night upon the ghostly Mill-house stairs,
though that might have cost me my life through
fear. In such absurd ways do children
measure the limits of their devotion, knowing nothing
of the red-hot ploughshares preparing to sear the
feet of their constancy through life. Dick's
face, far out in the world, had shone on me from
a happy distance. Some time to come my life
would be happier through him. When the wind
made a mournful sough in the copper-beech, it
grumbled because he was away; when the sun
shone, it shone on him somewhere. I wept with
sore jealousy when he wrote me about one
beautiful Sylvia who had taken the first place in his
heart, and had promised to be his wife. But he
came to see me and coaxed me out of my
sadness, and I wrote her by him with promises of
love. Soon after that his regiment was ordered
to the Crimea, and he was killed. In the
anguish of my grief, I could be glad that I had
opened my heart to his Sylvia. Of her I shall
have much to say further on, but at this stage of
my story I knew little concerning her. I learned
that her father died soon after my brother, leaving
her quite unprovided for. I had her address,
and knew that she earned her bread as companion
to a noble lady. But I am forgetting that I purposed
to begin this history by telling how I got
engaged to Luke Elphinstone.

CHAPTER II.
" MATTIE!" said Elspie on one well-remembered
February night in the beginning of my year,
"come in out of the cauld an' bide i' the nursery.