ing, but it was strange indeed (thought
he) if with Miss Mary within, and the sunshine and the throng and the
children playing in the syver sand without, he should not find life more
full and pleasant than it had been in the glen. All these thoughts made
warp for the woof of his attention to the street as he stood at the
window. And by-and-by there came a regret for the things lost with the
death of the little old woman of Ladyfield--what they were his mind did
not pause to make definite, but there was the sense of chances gone with
no recalling, of a calm, of a solitude, of a more intimate communion
with the animals of the wilds and the voices of the woods and hills.

The woman as well as the boy must have been lost in thought, for neither
of them noted the step upon the stair when the General and Cornal came
back from the dregy. The brothers were in the lobby beside them before
Miss Mary realised their presence. She turned with a flushed face and,
as it were, put herself a little in front of the boy, so that half his
figure found the shelter of a wing. The two brothers between them filled
the width of the lobby, and yet they were not wide. But they were broad
at the shoulders and once, no doubt, they filled their funeral suits
that of their own stiffness seemed to stand out in all their old
amplitude. The General was a white-faced rash of a man with bushy
eyebrows, a clean-shaven parchment jowl, and a tremulous hand upon the
knob of his malacca rattan; his brother the Cornal was less tall; he
was of a purpled visage, and a crimson scar, the record of a wound from
Corunna, slanted from his chin to the corner of his left eye.

"What wean is that?" he asked, standing in the lobby and casting a
suspicious eye upon the boy, his voice as high as in a barrack yard.
The General stood at his shoulder, saying nothing, but looking at Gilian
from under his pent brows.

Into Miss Mary's demeanour there had came as great a change as that
which came upon the Pay-master when she broke in upon his vaunting. The
lines dashed to her brow; when she spoke it was in a cold constrained
accent utterly different from that the boy had grown accustomed to.

"It is the _oe_ from Ladyfield," she explained.

"He'll be making a noise in the house," said the Cornal with a touch of
annoyance. "I cannot stand boys; he'll break things, I'm sure. When is
he going away?"

"Are you one of the boys who cry after Major MacNicol, my old friend
and comr