f a fowl. Oh! no, he had been a bluff, hearty,
hungry boy, hot-headed, red-legged, short-kilted, stirring, a bit of a
bully, a loud talker, a dour lad with his head and his fists. This boy
beside him made him think of neither man nor boy, but of his sister
Jennet, who died in the plague year, a wide-eyed, shrinking, clever
girl, with a nerve that a harsh word set thrilling.

"Did Jean Clerk say anything about where you are to sleep to-night?" he
asked him, still speaking the Gaelic in which he knew the little fellow
was most at home.

"I suppose I'll just stay in my own bed in Lady-field," said Gilian,
apparently little exercised by the thought of his future, and dividing
some of his attention to the Paymaster with the sounds and sights of
nature by the way, the thrust of the bracken crook between the crannies
of the Duke's dykes, the gummy buds of the limes and chestnuts, the
straw-gathering birds on the road, the heron so serenely stalking on the
shore, and the running of the tiny streams upon the beach that smoked
now in the heat of the sun.

The Paymaster seemed confounded. He swelled his neck more fully in the
stock, cleared his throat with a loud noise, took a great pinch of
snuff from his waistcoat pocket and spent a long time in disposing of it
Gilian was in a dream far off from the elderly companion and the smoking
shore; his spirit floated over the glen and sometimes farther still,
among the hill gorges that were always so full of mystery to him, or
farther still to the remote unknown places, foreign lands, cities,
towns, where giants and fairies roamed and outrage happened and kings
were, in the tales the shepherds told about the peat fires on _ceilidh_
nights.

"I'm afraid you'll have to sleep in the town tonight," said the
Paymaster, at last somewhat relieved of his confusion by the boy's
indifference; "the truth is we are shutting up Ladyfield for a little.
You could not stay alone in it at any rate, and did Jean Clerk not
arrange that you were to stay with her after this?"

"No," said Gilian simply, even yet getting no grasp of his homelessness.

"And where are you going to stay?" asked the Paymaster testily.

"I don't know," said the boy.

The Paymaster spoke in strange words under his breath and put on a
quicker pace and went through the town, even past the schoolhouse,
where old Brooks stood at the door in his long surtout saying a
Latin declension over to himself as if it were a song, and int