to the credit of Miss Ailie and Miss Kitty, though
they went about it as timidly as if they were participating in a crime.
Ever since they learned of the sin which had brought this man into the
world their lives had been saddened, for on the same day they realized
what a secret sorrow had long lain at their mother's heart. Alison
Sibbald was a very simple, gracious lady, who never recovered from the
shock of discovering that she had married a libertine; yet she had
pressed her husband to do something for his son, and been greatly pained
when he refused with a coarse laugh. The daughters were very like her in
nature, and though the knowledge of what she had suffered increased many
fold their love for her, so that in her last days their passionate
devotion to her was the talk of Redlintie, it did not blind them to what
seemed to them to be their duty to the man. As their father's son, they
held, he had a right to a third of the gauger's money, and to withhold
it from him, now that they knew his whereabouts, would have been a form
of theft. But how to give T. his third? They called him T. from
delicacy, and they had never spoken to him. When he passed them in the
streets, they turned pale, and, thinking of their mother, looked another
way. But they knew he winked.

At last, looking red in one street, and white in another, but resolute
in all, they took their business to the office of Mr. John McLean, the
writer, who had once escorted Miss Kitty home from a party without
anything coming of it, so that it was quite a psychological novel in
several volumes. Now Mr. John happened to be away at the fishing, and a
reckless maid showed them into the presence of a strange man, who was no
other than his brother Ivie, home for a year's holiday from India, and
naturally this extraordinary occurrence so agitated them that Miss Ailie
had told half her story before she realized that Miss Kitty was titting
at her dress. Then indeed she sought to withdraw, but Ivie, with the
alarming yet not unpleasing audacity of his sex, said he had heard
enough to convince him that in this matter he was qualified to take his
brother's place. But he was not, for he announced, "My advice to you is
not to give T. a halfpenny," which showed that he did not even
understand what they had come about.

They begged permission to talk to each other behind the door, and
presently returned, troubled but brave. Miss Kitty whispered "Courage!"
and this helped Miss