lly. "You are young yet. The best
would not be too good for you; but I know men, my dear, and the woman's
well off who gets merely the middling in her pick of them. And that
minds me, I had one asking for you at the kirk on Sunday. A soldier, no
less. Can you guess him?"

"The Paymaster's Boy," said she promptly, curiosity in her countenance.

Her father laughed.

"Pooh!" he exclaimed. "Is that all you have of our news here that you
don't know Gilian's farming, or making a show of farming, in Ladyfield?
He never took to the Army after all, and an old brag of Mars is very
humorous now when I think of it."

"I told him he never would," said Nan, with no note of triumph in the
accuracy of her prediction. "I thought he could play-act the thing in
his mind too well ever to be the thing itself."

"It was Young Islay I meant," said her father. "A smart fellow; he's
home on leave from his corps, and he promises to come some day this week
to see the girl whose father has some reason to be grateful to him."

She flushed all at once, overtaken by feelings she could not have
described--feelings of gratitude for the old rescue, of curiosity,
pleasure, and a sudden shyness. Following it came a sudden recollection
of the old glamour that was about the ensign--such another, no doubt, as
Young Islay--who had given her the first taste of gallantry as he passed
with the troops in a day of sunshine. She looked out at the window to
conceal her eyes, and behold! the glen was not so melancholy as it was
a little ago. She wished she had put on another gown that afternoon, the
rustling one of double tabinet that her Edinburgh friends considered too
imposing for her years, but that she herself felt a singular complacence
in no matter what her company might be.

"A smart fellow," repeated her father musingly, flicking some dust from
his shoes, unobserving of her abstraction. "I wish Sandy took a lesson
or two from him in application."

"Ah!" she cried, "you're partial just because----"

And she hesitated.

--"Just because he saved my lassie's life," continued Turner, and seized
by an uncommon impulse he put an arm round her and bent to kiss her
not unwilling lips. He paused at the threshold, and drew back with a
half-shamed laugh.

"Tuts!" said he. "You smit me with silly lowland customs. Fancy your old
Highland daddie kissing you! If it had been the young gentleman we speak
of----"

A loud rap came to the knocker of the front door