th in his chest.

"A man!" said she again. And she saw, as if a curtain had fallen from
before her eyes, that this was no more the fair-haired, wan-faced,
trembling child who came from Ladyfield to her heart.

"I wish, I wish," said she all trembling, "the children did not grow at
all!"

CHAPTER XXIV--MAAM HOUSE

Maam House stands mid-way up the Glen, among pasture and arable land
that seems the more rich and level because it is hemmed in by gaunt
hills where of old the robber found a sequestration, and the hunter of
deer followed his kingly recreation. The river sings and cries, almost
at the door, mellow in the linns and pools, or in its shallow links
cheerily gossiping among grey stones; the Dhu Loch shines upon its
surface like a looking-glass or shivers in icy winds. Round about the
bulrush nods; old great trees stand in the rains knee-deep like the
cattle upon its marge pondering, and the breath of oak and hazel hangs
from shore to shore.

To her window in the old house of Maam would Nan come in the mornings,
and the beauty of Dhu Loch would quell the song upon her lips. It
touched her with some melancholy influence. Grown tall and elegant,
her hair in waves about her ears, in a rich restrained tumult about
her head, her eyes brimming and full of fire, her lips rich, her bosom
generous--she was not the Nan who swung upon a gate and wished that
hers was a soldier's fortune. This place lay in her spirit like a
tombstone--the loneliness of it, the stillness of it, the dragging days
of it, with their dreary round of domestic duties. She was not a week
home, and already sleep was her dearest friend, and to open her eyes
in the morning upon the sunny but silent room and miss the clangour of
Edinburgh streets was a diurnal grief.

What she missed of the strident town was the clustering round of fellow
creatures, the eternal drumming of neighbour hearts, the feet upon the
pavement and the eager faces all around that were so full of interest
they did not let her seek into the depths of her, where lay the old
Highland sorrows that her richest notes so wondrously expressed. The
tumult for herl Constant touch with the active, the gay! Solitude
oppressed her like a looming disease. Sometimes, as in those mornings
when she looked abroad from her window upon the Glen, she felt sick
of her own company, terrified at the pathetic profound to which the
landscape made her sink. Then she wept, and then she shook the mood