sts of the
Paymaster who had whimsically remained tenant--the trade that was not
perhaps best suited for him, but at least came somehow most conveniently
to his practice. But for the loss of her consoling and continual company
there would have been almost joy on his part at this returning to the
scene of his childhood. He went back to it on a summer day figuring to
himself the content, the carelessness that had been his there before,
and thinking, poor fool, they were waiting where he had left them.

Ladyfield was a small farm of its kind with four hundred sheep, seven
cows, two horses, a goat or two and poultry. When the little old woman
with a face like a nut was alive she could see the whole tack at one
sweep of the eye from the rowan at the door, on the left up to the
plateau where five burns were born, on the right to the peak of
Drimfern. A pleasant place for meditation, bleak in winter for the want
of trees, but in other seasons in a bloom of colour.

Though he was there 'prentice to a hard calling, Gilian's life was more
the gentle's than the shepherd's. He might be often on the hill, but it
was seldom to tend his flock and bring them to fank for clip or keeling,
it was more often to meditate with a full pagan eye upon the mysteries
of the countryside. A certain weeping effect of the mists on the
ravines, one particular moaning sound of the wind among the rocks, had
a strange solace for his ear, chording with some sweet melancholy of his
spirit He loved it all, yet at times he would flee from the place as if
a terror were at his heels and in a revolt against the narrowness of his
life, hungering almost to starvation for some companionship, for some
salve to an anxious mind, and, in spite of his shyness, bathe in the
society of the town--an idler. The people as he rode past would
indicate him with a toss of the head over their shoulders, and say, "The
Paymaster's boy," and yet the down was showing on his lip. He would go
up the street looking from side to side with an expectancy that had no
object; he stared almost rudely at faces, seeking for he knew not what.

It was not the winters with their cold, their rain, their wind and
darkness, that oppressed him most in his banishment, but the summers. In
the winter the mists crowded so close about, and the snow so robbed
the land of all variety, that Ladyfield house with its peats burning
ceaselessly, its clean paven court, its store of books he had gathered
there,