But these unfinished references, these blinks in which his heart spoke, and his memory and reason rose up to silence it before the words were well uttered, gave her unqualifiable agony.

She was raised up and dashed down again bleeding.
The recurrence of the subject forced her, for however short a time, to open her eyes on what she did not wish to see; and it had invariably ended in another disappointment.

So now again, at the mere wind of its coming, at the mere mention of his father's name--who might seem indeed to have accompanied them in their whole moorland courtship, an awful figure in a wig with an ironical and bitter smile, present to guilty consciousness--she fled from it head down.
"Ye havena told me yet," she said, "who was it spoke ?" "Your aunt for one," said Archie.
"Auntie Kirstie ?" she cried.

"And what do I care for my Auntie Kirstie ?" "She cares a great deal for her niece," replied Archie, in kind reproof.
"Troth, and it's the first I've heard of it," retorted the girl.
"The question here is not who it is, but what they say, what they have noticed," pursued the lucid schoolmaster.

"That is what we have to think of in self-defence." "Auntie Kirstie, indeed! A bitter, thrawn auld maid that's fomented trouble in the country before I was born, and will be doing it still, I daur say, when I'm deid! It's in her nature; it's as natural for her as it's for a sheep to eat." "Pardon me, Kirstie, she was not the only one," interposed Archie.