The connexion betwixt Henry's supposed death and the descent of Conachar and his followers, though adopted by her in a moment of extreme and engrossing emotion, was sufficiently probable to have been received for truth, even if her understanding had been at leisure to examine its credibility.

Without knowing what she sought except the general desire to know the worst of the dreadful report, she hurried forward to the very spot which of all others her feelings of the preceding day would have induced her to avoid.
Who would, upon the evening of Shrovetide, have persuaded the proud, the timid, the shy, the rigidly decorous Catharine Glover that before mass on Ash Wednesday she should rush through the streets of Perth, making her way amidst tumult and confusion, with her hair unbound and her dress disarranged, to seek the house of that same lover who, she had reason to believe, had so grossly and indelicately neglected and affronted her as to pursue a low and licentious amour?
Yet so it was; and her eagerness taking, as if by instinct, the road which was most free, she avoided the High Street, where the pressure was greatest, and reached the wynd by the narrow lanes on the northern skirt of the town, through which Henry Smith had formerly escorted Louise.

But even these comparatively lonely passages were now astir with passengers, so general was the alarm.
Catharine Glover made her way through them, however, while such as observed her looked on each other and shook their heads in sympathy with her distress.

At length, without any distinct idea of her own purpose, she stood before her lover's door and knocked for admittance.
The silence which succeeded the echoing of her hasty summons increased the alarm which had induced her to take this desperate measure.
"Open--open, Henry!" she cried.

"Open, if you yet live! Open, if you would not find Catharine Glover dead upon your threshold!" As she cried thus frantically to ears which she was taught to believe were stopped by death, the lover she invoked opened the door in person, just in time to prevent her sinking on the ground.