er buttons of
his coat as if through him, and letting not so little as the edge of his
gaze fall upon his face. That was a studious contempt, and Gilian knew
it, and there were many considerations that made him feel no injury
at it. But the Cornal's utter indifference--that sent his eye
roaming unrecognising into Gilian's and away again without a spark of
recognition--was painful. It would have been an insufferable meal, even
in his hunger, but for Miss Mary's presence. The little lady would be
smiling to him across the table without any provocation whenever her
brothers' eyes were averted, and the faint perfume of a silk shawl she
had about her shoulders endowed the air with an odour of domesticity,
womanhood, maternity.

For a long time nobody spoke, and the pigeons came boldly to the sill of
the open window and cooed.

At last said the Paymaster, as if he were resuming a conversation: "I
met him out there on horseback; the hunt is still up, I'm thinking."

"Ay?" said the Cornal, as if he gripped the subject and waited the
continuance of the narrative.

"He'll have ranged the country, I'm thinking," went on his brother. "I
could not but be sorry for the man."

Miss Mary cast upon him a look he seldom got from her, of warmth more
than kinship, but she had nothing to say; her voice was long dumb in
that parlour where she loved and feared, a woman subjugate to a sex far
less worthy than her own and less courageous.

"Humph!" said the Cornal. He felt with nervous inquiry at his ragged
chin, inspired for a second by old dreads of untidy morning parades.

"I had one consolation for my bachelordom in him," went on the younger
brother, and then he paused confused.

"And what might that be?" asked the Cornal.

"It's that I'm never like to be in the same scrape with a child of
mine," he answered, pretending a jocosity that sat ill on him. Then
he looked at Miss Mary a little shamefaced for a speech so uncommonly
confidential.

The Cornal opened his mouth as if he would laugh, but no sound came.

"I'm minding," said he, speaking slowly and in a muffled accent he was
beginning to have always; "I'm minding when that same, cast in your face
by the gentleman himself, greatly put you about Jock, Jock, I mind you
were angry with Turner on that score! And no child to have the same
sorrows over! Well--well----" He broke short and for the first time let
his eyes rest with any meaning on Gilian sitting at the indulgence of a