the flags. The man was on them before Miss Mary realised his coming.
It was Mr. Spencer of the New Inn. He stopped with a salutation, coming
upon them, as it happened, in the light of the oil-lamp at the Cross
Well, and a discreet surprise was in his visage.

"It is an inclement evening, Miss Campbell," he said, in a shrill high
dainty accent that made him seem a foreigner when in converse among the
guttural Highland burghers.

She answered in some confusion, and by this time he had found a reason
for her late hour abroad in the wet deserted street.

"You have left the Sheriff's early to-night," said he. "I was asked, but
I find myself something of the awkward stranger from the big world when
I come into the kind and homely gatherings of the clans here."

"I think we are not altogether out of the big world you speak of,"
said Miss Mary, in a chilly tone. "The mantua-maker tells me the latest
fashions are here from London sooner than they are in Edinburgh." She
saw in his face the innkeeper's apology for his common sin against
the Gaelic vanity. "We were just out for an airing," she added, taking
Gilian's hand in hers and squeezing it with meaning.

"I thought, ma'am, you were at the Sheriffs," said Mr. Spencer.

"Oh! there is a party in the Sheriff's, is there?" she said. "That is
very nice; they have a hospitable house and many friends. I must
hurry home to my brothers, who, like all old gentlemen, are a little
troublesome and care neither to move out at night, nor to let me leave
them to go out myself."

She smiled up in his face with just a hint of a little coquette that
died in her twenty years before. She said "Good-night," and then she was
gone.

Mr. Spencer's footsteps sounded more slowly on the flagstone as he
resumed his accustomed evening walk, in which for once his mind was not
on London town, and old friends there, but upon the odd thing that while
this old maid had smiled upon him, there was a tear very plain upon her
cheek.

CHAPTER IX--ACADEMIA

In the fulness of time, Gilian attained to the highest class in old
Brooks' school, pushed up thereto by no honest application of his own,
but by the luck that attends on such as have God's gift to begin
with. And now that he was among the children of the town he found them
lovable, but yet no more lovable than the children of the glen. The
magic he had fancied theirs as he surveyed them from a distance, the
fascination they had before, even whe