off down the
stair with the boy still by the hand, the boy wide-eyed wondering,
unable to realise very clearly whether he was to be made a soldier or a
herd there and then. And when the door closed behind them Jean Clerk and
her sister sat down and wept and laughed in a curious mingling of sorrow
and joy--sorrow that the child had to be turned from their door and out
of their lives with even the pretence at inhospitality, and joy that
their device had secured for him a home and future more comfortable than
the best their straitened circumstances could afford.

CHAPTER IV--MISS MARY

The Paymaster and his two brothers lived with sister Mary on the upper
flats of the biggest house of the burgh. The lower part was leased to
an honest merchant whose regular payment of his rent did not prevent the
Paymaster, every time he stepped through the close, from dunting with
his cane on the stones with the insolence of a man whose birth and his
father's acres gave him a place high above such as earned their living
behind a counter.

"There you are, Sandy!" he would call, "doing no trade as usual; you'll
not have sold a parcel of pins or a bolt of tape to-day, I suppose.
Where am I to get my rent, I wonder, next Martinmas?"

The merchant would remonstrate. "I've done very well to-day, Captain,"
he would say. "I have six bolls of meal and seven yards of wincey going
up the glen in the Salachary cart."

"Pooh, pooh, what's that to the time of war? I'll tell you this, Sandy,
I'll have to roup out for my rent yet." And by he would sail, as red in
the face as a bubbly-jock, swelling his neck over his stock more largely
than ever, and swinging his rattan by its tassel or whacking with it on
his calves, satisfied once more to have put this merchant-body in his
own place.

To-day he paid no heed to the merchant, when, having just keeked in at
the schoolroom to tell Dr. Colin and old Brooks he would be back in a
minute to join the dregy, he went up the stairs with Gilian. "I'm going
to leave you with my sister Mary," he explained. "You'll think her
a droll woman, but all women have their tiravees, and my sister is a
well-meaning creature."

Gilian thought no one could be more droll than this old man himself.
Before indifferent to him, he had, in the past hour, grown to be afraid
of him as a new mysterious agent who had his future in his hands. And
to go up the stairs of this great high house, with its myriad windows
looking out