confusion, but she found the grip of his
coat again and followed up her triumph.

"Did you think I could not guess so little as that, my dear? Oh, Gilian,
sometimes I'll be sitting in there all my lone greeting my eyes out over
darning hose, and minding of what I have been and what I have seen, and
the days that will never come any more. The two upstairs will be minding
only to envy and to blame--me, I must be weeping as much for my sin as
for my sorrow. Do I look so terrible old, Gilian, that you cannot think
of me as not so bad-looking either, with a bonny eye, they said, and a
jimp waist, and a foot like the honey-bee? It was only yesterday; ah, it
was a hundred years ago! I was the sisterly slave. No dancing for me. No
romping for Mary at hairst or Hogmanay. My father glooming and binding
me motherless to my household tasks, so that Love went by without seeing
me. My companions, and she the dearest of them all, enjoying life to the
full, and me looking out at this melancholy window from year to year,
and seeing the traffic of youth and all the rest of it go by."

She released his lapel and relapsed, all tears, upon her chair.

"Auntie, Auntie!" he cried, "do not let my poor affairs be vexing you."
He put, for the first time in his life, an arm about her waist, bending
over her, with all forgotten for the moment save that she had longed for
love and seemingly found it not. At the touch of his arm she trembled
like a maiden in her teens and forced a smile upon her face. "Let me
go," she said, and yet she gloried in that contact as she sat in the
chair and he bent over her.

"And was there no one came the way?" he asked. "Was I not worth it, do
you think?" she replied, yet smiling in her tears. "Oh, Gilian, not this
old woman, mind you, but the woman I was. And yet--and yet, it is true,
no one came; or if they came, they never came that I wanted." "And he?"
said Gilian.

She paused and sighed, her thin little hands, so white for all their
toil in that hard barracks, playing upon her lap. "He never had the
chance. My father's parlour had no welcome, a soldier's household left
no vacant hours for an only daughter's gallivanting. I had to be content
to look at him--the one I mean--from the window, see him in the church
or passing up and down the street. They had up Dr. Brash at me--I mind
his horn specs, and him looking at my tongue and ordering a phlebotomy.
What I wanted was the open air, a chance of youth, and a da