the Bible Miss Mary laid
before him. The Paymaster took his seat beside the window, looking out
the while and heedless of the Scriptures, watched the fishermen crowding
for their mornings into the house of Widow Gordon the vintner. Miss Mary
stole glances at her youth, the maid Peggy fidgeted because she had left
the pantry door open and the cat was in the neighbourhood. As the old
man's voice monotonously occupied the room, working its way mumblingly
through the end of Exodus, conveying no meaning to the audience, Gilian
heard the moor-fowl cry beside Little Fox. The dazzle of the sunshine,
the sparkle of the water, the girl inhabiting that solitary spot, seemed
very real before him, and this dolorous routine of the elderly in a
parlour no more than a dream from which he would waken to find himself
with the girl he loved. Upon his knees beside his chair while the Cornal
gruffly repeated the morning prayer he learned from his father, he
remained the remote wanderer of fancy, and Miss Mary knew it by the
instinct of affection as she looked at the side of his face through
eyelids discreetly closed but not utterly fastened.

The worship was no sooner over than Gilian was for off after Miss Mary
to her own room, but the Paymaster stayed him with some cold business
query about the farm, and handed him a letter from a low-country wool
merchant relative to some old transaction still unsettled. Gilian read
it, and the brothers standing by the window resumed their talk about
the missing girl: it was the subject inspired by every glance into
the street where each passerby, each loiterer at a close mouth, was
obviously canvassing the latest news.

"There's her uncle away by," said the Paymaster, straining his head to
follow a figure passing on the other side of the street. "If they had
kept a stricter eye on her from the first when they had her they might
have saved themselves all this."

"Stricter eye!" said the Cornal. "You ken as much about women as I ken
about cattle. The veins of her body were full of caprice, that's what
ailed her, and for that is there any remede? I'm asking you. As if I did
not ken the mother of her! Man, man, man! She was the emblem and type of
all her sex, I'm thinking, wanting all sobriety, hating the thought of
age in herself and unfriendly to the same in others. A kind of a splash
on a fine day upon the deep sea, laughing over the surface of great
depths. I knew her well, Dugald knew her----"

"Yo