rchives that sin of
love is never indexed Her face had at once assumed a look of anxiety,
for she felt that the encounter had caused Gilian's dejection as he rode
down the street.

"What was he saying?" she asked at last, seeing there was no sign of
his volunteering more. And she spoke with a very creditable show of
indifference, and even hummed a little bar of song as she turned some
airing towels on a winter-dyke beside the fire.

"Do you think I'm a failure, auntie?" asked he, facing her. "That was
what he called me."

She was extremely hurt and angry.

"A failure!" she cried. "Did any one ever hear the like? God forgive me
for saying it of my brother, but what failure is more notorious than his
own? A windy old clerk-soger with his name in a ballant, no more like
his brothers than I'm like Duke George."

"You do not deny it!" said Gilian simply.

She moved up to him and looked at him with an affection that was a
transfiguration.

"My dear, my dear!" said she, "is there need for me to deny it? What are
you yet but a laddie?"

He fingered the down upon his lip.

"But a laddie," she repeated, determined not to see. "All the world's
before you, and a braw bonny world it is, for all its losses and its
crosses. There is not a man of them at the inn door who would not
willingly be in your shoes. The sour old remnants--do I not know them?
Grant me patience with them!"

"It was General Turner's word," said Gilian, utterly unconsoled, and he
wondered for a moment to see her flush.

"He might have had a kinder thought," said she, "with his own affairs,
as they tell me, much ajee, and Old Islay pressing for his loans. I'll
warrant you do not know anything of that, but it's the clavers of the
Crosswell." She hurried on, glad to get upon a topic even so little away
from what had vexed her darling. "Old Islay has his schemes, they say,
to get Maam tacked on to his own tenancy of Drimlee and his son out of
the army, and the biggest gentleman farmer in the shire. He has the ear
of the Duke, and now he has Turner under his thumb. Oh my sorrow, what a
place of greed and plot!"

"That Turner said it, showed he thought it!" said Gilian, not a whit
moved from bitter reflection upon his wounded feelings.

"Amn't I telling you?" said Miss Mary. "It's just his own sorrows
souring him. There's Sandy, his son, a through-other lad (though I aye
liked the laddie and he's young yet), and his daughter back from her
schooling in