into
the room. "I'm wearied of washing sheets and blankets for a corps of
wrunkled old brothers that have no gratitude for my sisterly slavery.
Keep me! who's _ballachan_ is that?"

She was a little thin woman, of middle age, with a lowland cap of lace
that went a little oddly with the apron covering the front of the merino
gown from top to toe. She had eyes like sloes, and teeth like pearls
that gleamed when she smiled, and by constant trying to keep herself
from smiling at things, she had worn two lines up and down between her
eyebrows. A dear fond heart, a darling hypocrite, a foolish bounteous
mother-soul without chick or child of her own, and yet with tenement for
the loves of a large family. She fended, and mended, and tended for her
soldier brothers, and they in the selfish blindness of their sex never
realised her devotion. They sat, and over punch would talk of war, and
valour, and devotion, and never thought that here, within their very
doors, was a constant war in their behalf against circumstances, in
their interest an unending valour that kept the little woman bustling on
her feet, and shrewd-eyed over her stew-pans, while weariness and pain
itself, and the hopeless unresponse and ingratitude of the surroundings,
rendered her more appropriate place between the bed-sheets.

"What _ballachan_ is this?" she asked, relaxing the affected acidity of
her manner and smoothing out the lines upon her brow at the sight of
the little fellow in a rough kilt, standing in a shy unrest upon the
spotless drugget of her parlour floor. She waited no answer, but went
forward as she spoke, as one who would take all youth to her heart, put
a hand on his head and stroked his fair hair. It was a touch wholly
new to the boy; he had never felt before that tingling feeling that a
woman's hand, in love upon his head, sent through all his being. At the
message of it, the caress of it, he shivered and looked up at her face
in surprise.

"What do you think of him, Mary?" asked the brother. "Not a very stout
chap, I think, but hale enough, and if you stuck his head in a pail of
cream once a day you might put meat on him. He's the _oe_ from Ladyfield;
surely you might know him even with his boots on."

"Dear, dear," she said; "you're the Gilian I never saw but at a
distance, the boy who always ran to the hill when I went to Ladyfield.
O little hero, am I not sorry for the goodwife? You have come for your
pick of the dinner----"

"Do