CHAPTER XXVII.

FORSAKEN.

'My daughter, sorrow comes to all :

Our life is checked with sorrows manifold;
But woman has this more, she may not call
Her sorrow by its name.'

JEAN INGELOW.

'This is truth the poet sings,

That a sorrow's crown of sorrows is remembering happier things.'

TENNYSON.

317

CHAPTER XXVII.

THIS indeed poor Marion was doing. A dozen tongues made free with her lover's name, and a dozen more now coupled her name with his. Christy was intolerable, and tormented her with insinuations and innuendoes till the girl felt as if she must lose her reason. 'Oh! to what was I ever born to be forsaken thus!' she cried on Sunday night, when, after the cruel ordeal of appearing in her usual place at church during two services, she broke down completely, and flung herself on the floor in her agony.

Το

'To what were ye born, ye daft hempie? plenty o' gude meat and drink, that 'ither folk hae to want. Hear to the gracelessness of them that can have their insides filled without working for it!'

Alas! this forsaken Marion would gladly have washed, worked, and baked, and mended, and laboured all her days, might it only have been for the man whom

she loved, but of whose faith she was now beginning, in spite of herself, to have some doubts. She abhorred herself, it is true, for the very doubts which arose in her mind, because her intuitions were already at work, warning her that Robert Fairlie's passion, so rash in utterance, was poor in conception when compared with hers, and that he might also prove feeble of perseverance in adverse days.

As soon as her friend Maggie Brodie heard of the disappearance of the young Doctor, she came over to see Marion, and to ask her what had gone wrong.

All through her visit the poor girl sat pale and quiet, until at the end, when Maggie, on rising to go, took her into her loving arms.

'Do not sit with that look on your face,' she cried; and then Marion's pent-up agony broke forth.

'Oh! Maggie, Maggie, love me, kiss me; but oh! do not try to comfort me!' And she seemed as if she must suffocate.

'But what is the matter, my own Marion?'

'I don't know, and that is what hurts me so. He has gone away on some business of his father's, but