ess." And she
smiled upon the lad with the most wonderful light of affection in her
eyes.

"Oh," he cried, "am I not sure of that, Auntie? You are too good to me.
What am I to be complaining--the beggarly orphan?"

"Not that, my dear," she cried courageously, "not that! In this house,
when my brothers' looks were at their blackest for you, there has always
been goodwill and motherliness. But you must not be miscalling them that
share our roof, the brothers of Dugald and of Jamie." Her voice broke in
a gasp of melancholy; she stretched an arm and dusted from a corner
of the kitchen a cobweb that had no existence, her eyesight dim with
unbrimming tears. At any other time than now Gilian would have been
smitten by her grief, for was he not ever ready to make the sorrows of
others his own? But he was frowning in a black-browed abstraction on
the clay scroll of the kitchen floor, heartsick of his dilemma and the
bitterness of the speeches he had just heard.

Miss Mary could not be long without observing, even in her own troubles,
that he was unusually vexed. She was wise enough to know that a fresh
start was the best thing to put them at an understanding.

"What did you come to tell me to-day?" she asked, composing herself
upon a chair beside him and taking up some knitting, for hers were the
fingers that were never idle.

"Come down to tell you? Come down to tell you?" he repeated, in surprise
at her penetration, and in some confusion that he should so sharply be
brought to his own business.

"Just so," she said. "Do you think Miss Mary has no eyes, my dear, or
that they are too old for common use? There was something troubling you
as you came in at the door; I saw it in your face--ay, I heard it in
your step on the stair."

He fidgeted and evaded her eyes. "I heard outside that--that Turner's
daughter had not been got, and it vexed me a little."

"Turner's daughter!" she said. "It used to be Miss Nan; it was Miss Nan
no further gone than Thursday, and for what need we be so formal to-day?
You are not heeding John's havers about your name being mixed up with
the affair in a poor Sassanach inn-keeper's story? Eh, Gilian?" And she
eyed him shrewdly, more shrewdly than he was aware of.

Still he put her off. He could not take her into his confidence so soon
after that cold plunge into truth in the parlour. He wanted to get out
of doors and think it all over calmly. He pretended anger.

"What am I to be talked to li