nd upon his waist, pretending to hasten the departure, but in
reality to get some pleasure from the touch. Again he never heeded; he
was staring at the Maam pew, from which the General and his brother were
slowly moving out.

There was no girl there!

He could scarcely trust his eyes. The aisle had a few women in it,
moving decorously to the door with busy eyes upon each other's clothes;
but no, she was not there, whose voice had made the few psalms of the
day the sweetest of his experience. When he got outside the door and
upon the entrance steps the whole congregation was before him; his
glance went through it in a flash twice, but there was no Miss Nan. Her
father and his brother walked up the street alone. Gilian realised that
his imagination, and his imagination only, had tenanted the pew. She was
not there!

CHAPTER XXIII--YOUNG ISLAY

"The clash in the kirkyard is worth half a dozen sermons," say the
unregenerate, and though no kirkyard is about the Zion of our parish,
the people are used to wait a little before home-going and talk of a
careful selection of secular affairs; not about the prices of hoggs
and queys, for that is Commerce, nor of Saturday night's songs in the
tavern, for that (in the Sabbath mind) is Sin. But of births, marriages,
courtships, weather, they discourse. And Gilian, his head dazed, stood
in a group with the Paymaster and Miss Mary, and some of the people of
the glens, who were the ostensible reason for the palaver. At first he
was glad of the excuse to wait outside, for to have gone the few yards
that were necessary down the street and sat at Sunday's cold viands even
with Peggy's brew of tea to follow would be to place a flight of stairs
and a larch door between him and---- And what? What was he reluctant
to sever from? He asked himself that with as much surprise as if he had
been a stranger to himself. He felt that to go within at once would be
to lose something, to go out of a most agreeable atmosphere. He was not
hungry. To sit with old people over an austere table with no flowers
on it because of the day, and see the Paymaster snuff above his tepid
second day's broth, and hear the Cornal snort because the mince-collops
his toothless-ness demanded on other days of the week were not available
to-day, would be, somehow, to bring a sordid, unable, drab and weary
world close up on a vision of joy and beauty. He felt it in his flesh,
in some flutter of the breast It was better t