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She turned, ran down the corridor to the door which she understood was the door of his study and entered with a burst. "Edmund! I want to speak to you!" Melrose, who was hanging, frowning and absorbed, over a carpenter who was freeing what seemed to be an old clock from the elaborate swathings of paper and straw in which it had been packed, looked up with annoyance.
Late in the evening of August 29, 1817, I arrived at the ancient little border town of Selkirk, where I put up for the night. I had come down from Edinburgh, partly to visit Melrose Abbey and its vicinity, but chiefly to get sight of the "mighty minstrel of the north."
She went back to Versailles that afternoon with the definite intention of writing to Strefford unless the next morning's post brought a letter. The next morning brought nothing from Nick, but a scribbled message from Mrs. Melrose: would Susy, as soon as possible, come into her room for a word, Susy jumped up, hurried through her bath, and knocked at her hostess's door.
It was not till 1865 that an old woman told me that when Miss F. B. came to return some books and music to her to give to my aunt in Melrose, "she just sat in the chair and cried as if her heart would break." She was not quite a free agent. Very few single women were free agents in 1839. We were hopelessly ruined, our place would know us no more.
Besides," added she, smiling, "you know, my dear, that unless you are a good horsewoman, I can never have the pleasure of seeing you at Melrose; for your dear papa cannot afford to send you by any other mode of conveyance.
"Norma, you'll have to tell him God help us all! She's gone!" Mrs. Melrose never spoke again, or showed another flicker of the clear and normal intelligence that she had shown in the night. But she still breathed, and the long, wet day dragged slowly, in the big, mournful old house, until late in the unnatural afternoon.
Melrose mounted her steps with the householder's secret complacency. They were scrupulously brushed of the last trace of snow, and the heavy door at the top swung noiselessly open to admit her. She suddenly realized that she was very tired, that her fur coat was heavy, and her back ached. She swept straight to the dark old curving stairway, and mounted slowly.
There is one of these charters called De Pitancia Centum Librarum By this charter, which is very curious, our Robert Bruce, on the 10th January, and in the twelfth year of his reign, assigns, out of the customs of Berwick, and failing them, out of the customs of Edinburgh or Haddington, the sum of one hundred pounds, at the half-yearly terms of Pentecost and Saint Martin's in winter, to the abbot and community of the monks of Melrose.
"He took me in and I can't forgive him. He is doing all Melrose's dirty work for him, better than Melrose could do it himself. His letters, for instance, to our Council Committee about the allotments we are trying to get out of the old villain have been devilish clever, and devilish impudent! Melrose couldn't have written them. And now this business of the girl! and the fortune! sickening!"
Susy looked steadily at Fulmer, their eyes met, and he smiled at her faintly through his beard. "Yes, I did discover him I did," Mrs. Melrose was insisting, from the depths of the black velvet divan in which she lay sunk like a wan Nereid in a midnight sea.
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