down on
a horsehair-covered sofa which had two worked worsted cushions, each
stiffly upright in its corner. One represented a dog's head, the other a
bunch of white and yellow flowers with a cold background of steel beads.
On the walls hung a few steel engravings; a meeting of Covenanters;
portraits of unco' guid worthies with sidewhiskers or beards; and some
tortured stags pursued or caught by hounds.

"Terrible!" he groaned in spirit. "Who'd suppose that such things
existed nowadays?"

He might appropriately have made much the same criticism of the old
woman who at that instant opened the door and came in, sturdily, in
spite of her limp and the stout stick grasped in a knuckly hand. But as
their eyes met--hers like thick glass panes behind which a burning fire
could be dimly seen--something in her grim spirit spoke to something as
grim and uncompromising far down his nature. To his own surprise he felt
awaking in himself a queer impulse of sympathy for the redoubtable
Grandma. Perhaps, reluctantly, she felt the same for him. But she looked
him in the face, keenly and unblinkingly. "Well, sir," she said, in a
deep voice almost like a man's, and amazingly young and vital, "well,
sir, I do not recognize you, though you have gained entrance to my house
by claiming the name of MacDonald."

"That is true," replied Ian, who had risen at her coming. "It's the
first time I've claimed the name for many years, though it is mine and
was my father's before me."

"Who was your father?" the old woman catechized him. "What kin to
Duncan, my dead husband's half-brother?"

"No kin except by clan ties. You wouldn't have heard of us. My father
was a crofter. His name was David."

"I well remember that man," said Mrs. MacDonald, "and his wife too when
I lived with my husband on the island in my youth. Let me see--Mary her
name was. They were God-fearing folk, and didn't wear any such grand
clothes as you do, not even for their Sunday best."

"I paint people's portraits, you see, and have to live in cities,"
explained Ian calmly, though he had grown lazy as he grew rich and had
not painted. "My clothes suit my trade and way of life better than my
father's would, I think; though, as for my brains, my father's hat would
have been too big for them."

"I dare say you are right about the brains. You are that youth who went
off to America under the name of Somerled," Mrs. MacDonald severely
remarked. "I have read of you in the newspap