could not take my eyes from it; I used to wonder if it could be that
which made me love him so much--his mouth. I have never seen another
anything like it. The steady, strong, and yet delicate lips--so calm and
serious when still, as to make one feel at rest merely to look at them;
but when in motion extraordinarily sensitive, quivering, curving, and
curling in sympathy with every thought.

I loved both children; but perhaps the reason that made me love Paul
most was--that whilst I knew Janet's nature, out and in, to the core of
her very loving little heart, Paul's often puzzled me.

There was not much in the way of landscape to be seen from that villa in
the suburbs of Glasgow; but we did catch just one glimpse of sky which
was not always obscured by smoke, and I have seen Paul, lost in thought,
looking up at this patch of blue, with an expression on his face--at
once sweet and sorrowful--so strange in one so young, that it made me
instinctively move more quietly, not to disturb him, and set me
wondering.

However, what with one thing and another, I was not by any means
heart-broken when Duncan married again--one of the kindest women in the
world; I can't think what she saw in him--and thus released me.

So the years flew on--and the wheel of fortune gave some strange turns
for Duncan. By a series of wonderfully successful speculations he
rapidly amassed a huge fortune.

They left Glasgow then, and built a colossal white brick mansion not far
from London.

When Janet was eighteen and Paul twenty-one, I paid them a visit there.
Except that Janet was now grown up, she was just the same--with her
thriftless, thoughtless ways, and her laughing baby face, and her yellow
head--a silly little head enough, perhaps, but a dear, dear little head
to me.

She had the same admiration, almost awe, of the splendours of this world
in any form; the same love of fine clothes--with the same carelessness
as to how she used them. It gave me a good laugh, the first afternoon I
was there, to see her come in with a new dress all soiled and torn by a
holly-bush she had pushed her way through on the lawn. It made me think
of the time when she had gone popping in and out to the little back
garden at Glasgow, and singing and swinging about the stairs--a bonnie
wee lassie with a dirty pink cotton gown, and, as often as not, dirtier
face.

Paul seemed to me, in looks at least, to have more than fulfilled the
promise of his boyhood. A hand