It was a subject which he never conversed upon, if indeed his mode of speech could be called conversation at any time; but it was often present to his imagination.
The sort of hope so strongly affirmed and asserted in Mrs.Bertram's last settlement had excited a corresponding feeling in the Dominie's bosom, which was exasperated into a sort of sickening anxiety by the discredit with which Pleydell had treated it.

'Assuredly,' thought Sampson to himself, 'he is a man of erudition, and well skilled in the weighty matters of the law; but he is also a man of humorous levity and inconsistency of speech, and wherefore should he pronounce ex cathedra, as it were, on the hope expressed by worthy Madam Margaret Bertram of Singleside ?' All this, I say, the Dominie THOUGHT to himself; for had he uttered half the sentence, his jaws would have ached for a month under the unusual fatigue of such a continued exertion.

The result of these cogitations was a resolution to go and visit the scene of the tragedy at Warroch Point, where he had not been for many years; not, indeed, since the fatal accident had happened.

The walk was a long one, for the Point of Warroch lay on the farther side of the Ellangowan property, which was interposed between it and Woodbourne.

Besides, the Dominie went astray more than once, and met with brooks swoln into torrents by the melting of the snow, where he, honest man, had only the summer recollection of little trickling rills.
At length, however, he reached the woods which he had made the object of his excursion, and traversed them with care, muddling his disturbed brains with vague efforts to recall every circumstance of the catastrophe.