mbrances led up to--the word
Beware.

But Gilian guessed the word, and his assumption of ignorance was to
prevent Miss Mary from guessing so much. Only he misunderstood. He looked
upon the desire to keep him from the company of the people of Maam as
due to the old rancours and jealousies, while indeed it was all in his
interest.

But in any case he respected the feelings of the Paymaster's family,
and thereafter for long he avoided as honestly as a boy might all
intercourse with the girl, whom circumstance the mischievous, the
henchman of the enemy, put in his way more frequently almost than any
of her sex. He must be meeting her in the street, the lane, the
market-place, in the highway, or in walks along the glen. He kept aloof
as well as he might (yet ever thinking her for song and charm the most
interesting girl he knew), and the days passed; the springs would be
but a breath of rich brown mould and birch, the summers but a flash
of golden days growing briefer every year, the winters a lessening
interlude of storm and darkness.

Gilian grew like a sapling in all seasons, in mind and fancy as in body.
Ever he would be bent above the books of Marget Maclean, getting deeper
to the meaning of them. The most trivial, the most inadequate and common
story had for him more than for its author, for under the poor battered
phrase that runs through book and book, the universal gestures of
bookmen, he could see history and renew the tragedies that suggested
them at the outset. He was no more Brooks' scholar though he sat upon
his upper forms, for, as the dominie well could see, he was launching
out on barques of his own; the plain lessons ot the school were without
any interest as they were without any difficulty to him. He roamed about
the woods, he passed precious hours upon the shore, his mind plangent
like the wave.

"A droll fellow that of the Paymaster's," they said of him in the
town. For as he aged his shyness grew upon him, and he went about the
community at ease with himself only when his mind was elsewhere.

"A remarkable young gentleman," said Mr. Spencer one day to the
Paymaster. "I am struck by him, sir, I am struck. He has an air of
cleverness, and yet they tell me he is--"

"He is what?" asked the Paymaster, lowering his brows suspicious on the
innkeeper's hesitation.

"They tell me he is not so great a credit to old Brooks as he might
expect," said the innkeeper, who was not lacking in boldness or plain