"He will be home to-night?"

"I do not know."

All this time no sound had reached them from the interior of the room where the two women sat together. Their voices must have been very low, their sobs subdued. Angela had not cried out as Mrs. Luttrell had done when she received the fatal news. No movement, no sign of grief was to be heard.

Brian lifted up his grief-stricken eyes at last, and fixed them on the doctor's face.

"Are they dead?" he muttered, strangely. "Will they never speak again?"

Doctor Muir did not immediately reply. He had placed the candle on a wooden bracket in the wall, and its flickering beams lighted, the dark corridor so feebly that until now he had scarcely caught a glimpse of the young man's haggard looks. They frightened him a little. He himself took life so easily--fretted so little against the inevitable--that he scarcely understood the look of anguish which an hour or two of trouble had imprinted upon Brian Luttrell's face. It was the kind of sorrow which has been known to turn a man's hair from black to white in a single night.

"I will knock at the door," said the doctor. But before he could carry out his intention, footsteps were heard, and the handle of the door was turned. Both men drew back involuntarily into the shadow as Mrs.

Luttrell and Angela came forth.

Angela had been weeping, but there were no signs of tears upon the elder woman's face. Rigid, white, and hard, it looked almost as if it were carved in stone; a mute image of misery too deep for tears. There were lines upon her brow that had never been seen there before; her lips were tightly compressed; her eyes fiercely bright. She had thrown a black shawl over her head on coming away from the drawing-room into the draughty corridors. This shawl, which she had forgotten to remove, together with the dead blackness of her dress, gave her pale face a strangely spectral appearance. Clinging to her, and yet guiding her, came Angela, with the white flower crushed and drooping from her hair.

She also was ashy pale, but there was a more natural and tender look of grief to be read in her wet eyes and on her trembling lips than in the stony tranquility of Richard Luttrell's mother.

Brian could not contain himself. He rushed forward and threw himself on the ground at his mother's feet. Mrs. Luttrell shrank back a little and clutched Angela's arm fiercely with her thin, white fingers.

"Mother, speak to me; tell me that you--mother, only speak!"

His voice died away in irrepressible sobs which shook him from head to foot. He dared not utter the word "forgiveness" yet. Unintentional as the harm might be that his hand had done, it was sadly irreparable, too.

Mrs. Luttrell looked at him with scarcely a change of feature, and tried to withdraw some stray fold of her garments from his grasp. He resisted; he would not let her go. His heart was aching with his own trouble, and with the consciousness of her loss--Angela's loss--all the suffering that Richard's death would inflict upon these two women who had loved him so devotedly. He yearned for one little word of comfort and affection, which even in that terrible moment, a mother should have known so well how to give. But he lay at that mother's feet in vain.

It was Angela who spoke first.

"Speak to him, mother," she said, tremblingly. "See how he suffers. It was not his fault."

The tears ran down her pale cheeks unnoticed as she spoke. It was only natural to Angela that her first words should be words of consolation to another, not of sorrow for her own great loss. But Mrs. Luttrell did not unclose her lips.

"Ye'll not be hard upon him, madam," said the old doctor, deprecatingly.

"Your own lad, and a lad that kneels to you for a gentle word, and will be heartbroken if you say him nay."

"And is my heart not broken?" asked the mother, lifting her head and looking away into the darkness of the long corridor. "The son that I loved is dead; the boy that came to me like a little angel in the spring of my youth--they say that he is dead and cold. I am going to look at his face again. Come, Angela. Perhaps they have spoken falsely, and he is alive--not murdered, after all."

"Murdered? Mother!"

Brian raised himself a little and repeated the word with shuddering emphasis.

"Murdered!" said Mrs. Luttrell, steadily, as she turned her burning eyes full upon the countenance of her younger son; as if to watch the workings of his agitated features. "If not by the laws of man, by God's laws you are guilty. You had quarrelled with him that day; and you took your revenge. I tell you, James Muir, and you, Angela Vivian, that Brian Luttrell took his brother's life by no mistake--that he is Richard's murderer----"

"No; I swear it by the God who made me--no!" cried Brian, springing to his feet.

But his mother had turned away.

CHAPTER V.

THE DEAD MAN'S TESTIMONY.

About ten o'clock at night Hugo Luttrell was seen entering the courtyard at the back of the house, where keepers, grooms, and indoor servants were collected in a group, discussing in low tones the event of the day.

Seeing these persons, he seemed inclined to go back by the way that he had come; but the butler--an old Englishman who had been in the Luttrell family before Edward Luttrell ever thought of marrying a Scotch heiress and settling for the greater part of every year at Netherglen--this said butler, whose name was William Whale, caught sight of the young fellow and accosted him by name.

"Mr. Hugo, sir, there's been many inquiries after you," he began in a lugubrious tone of voice.

"After me, William?" Hugo looked frightened and uneasy. "What for?"

"You won't have heard of the calamity that has come upon the house,"

said William, shaking his head solemnly; "and it will be a great shock to you, no doubt, sir; a terrible shock. Stand back, you men, there; let Mr. Hugo pass. Come into the housekeeper's room, sir. There's a fire in it; the night has turned chilly. Go softly, if you please, sir."

Hugo followed the old man without another question. He looked haggard and wearied; his clothes were wet, torn and soiled; his very hair was damp, and his boots were soaked and burst as though from a long day's tramp. Mrs. Shairp, the housekeeper, with whom he was a favourite, uttered a startled exclamation at his appearance.

"Guid guide us, sirs! and whaur hae ye been hidin' yoursel' a' this day an' nicht, Mr. Hugo? We've baen sair trouble i' th' hoose, and naebody kent your whaurabouts. Bairn! but ye're just droukit! Whaur hae you hidden yoursel' then?"

"Hidden!" Hugo repeated, catching at one of the good woman's words and ignoring the others. "I've not hidden anywhere. I've been over the hills a bit--that's all. What is the matter?"

He seated himself in the old woman's cushioned chair, and leaned forward to warm himself at the fire as he spoke, holding out first one hand and then the other to the leaping blaze.

"How will I tell you?" said Mrs. Shairp, relapsing into the tears she had been shedding for the last two hours or more. "Is it possible that ye've heard naething ava? The laird--Netherglen himsel'--oor maister--and have you heard naething aboot him as you cam doun by the muir? I'd hae thocht shame to let you gang hame unkent, if I had been Jenny Burns at the lodge."

"I did not come that way," said Hugo, impatiently. "What is the matter with the laird?"

"Maitter?--maitter wi' the laird? The laird's deid, laddie, and a gude freend was he to me and mine, and to your ain sei' forbye, and the hale kintra side will be at the buryin'," said the housekeeper, shaking her head solemnly. "An' if that were na enow for my poor mistress there's a waur thing to follow. The laird's fa'en by his ain brither's han's. Mr.

Brian shot him this verra nicht, as they cam' thro' the wud."

"By mistake, Mrs. Shairp, by mistake," murmured William Whale. But Hugo lifted his haggard face, which looked very pale in the glow of the firelight.

"You can't mean what you are saying," he said, in a hoarse, unnatural voice. "Richard? Richard--dead! Oh, it must be impossible!"

"True, sir, as gospel," said Mrs. Shairp, touched by the ring of pain that came into the young man's voice as he spoke. "At half-past eight, by the clock, they brought the laird hame stiff and stark, cauld as a stane a'ready. The mistress is clean daft wi' sorrow; an' I doot but Mr.

Brian will hae a sair time o't wi' her and the bonny young leddy that's left ahent."

Hugo dropped his face into his hands and did not answer. A shudder ran through his frame more than once. Mrs. Shairp thought that he was shedding tears, and motioned to William Whale, who had been standing near the door with a napkin over his arm, to leave the room. William retired shutting the door softly behind him.

Presently Hugo spoke. "Tell me about it," he said. And Mrs. Shairp was only too happy to pour into his ears the whole story as she had learned it from the keeper who had come upon the scene just after the firing of the fatal shot. He listened almost in silence, but did not uncover his face.

"And his mother?" he asked at length.

Mrs. Shairp could say little about the laird's mother. It was Dr. Muir who had told her the truth, she said, and the whole house had heard her cry out as if she had been struck. Then Miss Vivian had gone to her, and had received the news from Mrs. Luttrell's own lips. They had gone together to look at Richard's face, and then Miss Vivian had fainted, and had been carried into Mrs. Luttrell's own room, where she was to spend the night. So much Mrs. Shairp knew, and nothing more.

"And where is Brian?"

"Whaur should he be?" demanded the old woman, with some asperity. "Whaur but in's ain room, sair cast doun for the ill he has dune."