o
shrink to a child's size. It was a twelve-window house, and so among the
highest taxed in all the town, but in the parlour there were two blind
windows and only one gave light to the interior, so that as she sat in
her chair with her back to the window, her face in the shadow, leaning
against the chair haffits with the aspect of weariness her brothers
never had revealed to them, it seemed to Gilian the little figure and
the ruddy face of a companion. She was silent for a moment after his
confessions were completed, as if she had been wandering with him in the
realm of fancy, and with wings less practised had taken longer to fly
back to the narrow actual world. The boy had realised how much he had
forgotten himself, and how strange all this story of his must be even to
a child-companion with her face in the shadow of the chair haffits, and
his eyes were faltering with shame.

"You are very thin, sweetheart," said she, with the two lines darkly
pencilled between her eyebrows. "You are far too white for a country
boy; upon my word we must be taking the Captain's word for it and
putting your head in the cream."

At this Gilian's confusion increased. Here was another to misunderstand,
and he had thought she was shivering to his fancy as he was himself. He
turned to hide his disappointment. At once the lines disappeared. She
rose and put an arm over his shoulder and stooped the little that was
necessary to whisper in his ear.

"I know, I think I know," said she; "but look, I'm very old and ancient.
Oh, dear! I once had my own fancies, but I think they must have
been sweat out of me in my constancy to my brothers' oven-grate and
roasting-jack. It must be the old, darling, foolish Highlands in us,
my dear, the old people and the old stupid stories they are telling for
generations round the fire, and it must be the hills about us, and the
constant complaint of the sea--tuts! am not I foolish to be weeping
because a boy from Glen Aray has not learned to keep his lips closed on
his innermost thought?"

Gilian looked up, and behold! she was in a little rain of tears, at
least her eyes swam soft in moisture. It comforted him exceedingly, for
it showed that after all she understood.

"If you were a little older," she said, "so old as the merchants of the
town that are all too much on the hunt for the bawbees and the world
to sit down and commune with themselves, or if you were so old as my
brothers there and so hardened, I wo