behoved her to begin her new duties with alacrity, as there might not
long be occasion for them. She put another question before she went.
'And who will there be living in the house now?'

'There's just Miss Macdonald that lives with her mother; and there's
Mistress Brown--she'll be coming up most of the days now, but she dinna
live there; and there's Ann Johnston, that's helping Miss Macdonald with
the nursing--she's been staying at the house for a year back. That's all
that there'll be of them besides the servants, except that there's Dr.
Robert. His name is Macdonald, too, ye know; he's a nephew, and he's the
minister o' the kirk here. He goes up every day to see how his aunt's
getting on. I'm thinking he'll be up there now; it's about his time for
going.'

The maid took the way pointed out to her. Soon she was walking up a
gravel path, between trim, old-fashioned laurel hedges. She stood at the
door of a detached house. It was an ordinary middle-class
dwelling--comfortable, commodious, ugly enough, except that stolidity
and age did much to soften its ugliness. It had, above all, the air of
being a home--a hospitable open-armed look, as if children had run in
and out of it for years, as if young men had gone out from it to see the
world and come back again to rest, as if young girls had fluttered about
it, confiding their sports and their loves to its ivy-clad walls. Now
there hung about it a silence and sobriety that were like the shadows of
coming oblivion. The gas was turned low in the hall. The old-fashioned
omnibus that came lumbering from the railway with a box for the new maid
seemed to startle the place with its noise.

In the large dining-room four people were sitting in dreary discussion.
The gas-light flared upon heavy mahogany furniture, upon red moreen