pinky, pearly gold, something between
the violet and the saffron tones of a summer sunset.

Three girls were seated on a little stone bench outside the lonely,
neglected-looking house. They were roughly and plainly dressed. They
wore frocks of the coarsest Scotch tweed; and Scotch tweed, when it is
black, can look very coarse, indeed. They clung close together--a
desolate-looking group--Betty, the eldest, in the middle; Sylvia
pressing up to her at one side; Hetty, with her small, cold hand locked
in her sister's, on the other.

"I wonder when Uncle John will come," was Hetty's remark after a pause.
"Jean says we are on no account to travel alone; so, if he doesn't come
to-night, we mayn't ever reach that fine school after all."

"I am not going to tell him about the packet. I have quite made up my
mind on that point," said Betty, dropping her voice.

"Oh, Bet!" The other two looked up at their elder sister.

She turned and fixed her dark-gray eyes first on one face, then on the
other. "Yes," she said, nodding emphatically; "the packet is sure to
hold money, and it will be a safe-guard. If we find the school
intolerable we'll have the wherewithal to run away."

"I've read in books that school life is very jolly sometimes," remarked
Sylvia.

"Not _that_ school," was Betty's rejoinder.

"But why not that school, Betty?"

Betty shrugged her shoulders. "Haven't you heard that miserable
creature, Fanny Crawford, talk of it? I shouldn't greatly mind going
anywhere else, for if there's a human being whom I cordially detest, it
is my cousin, Fanny Crawford."

"I hear the sound of wheels!" cried Sylvia, springing to her feet.

"Ah, and there's Donald coming back," said Betty; "and there is Uncle
John! No chance of escape, girls! We have got to go through it. Poor old
David!"--here she alluded to the horse who was tugging a roughly made
dogcart up the very steep hill--"he'll miss us, perhaps; and so will
Fritz and Andrew, the sheep-dogs. Heigh-ho! there's no good being too
sorrowful. That money is a rare comfort!"

By this time the old white horse, and Donald, who was driving, and the
gentleman who sat at the opposite side of the dogcart, drew up at the
top of the great plateau. The gentleman alighted and walked swiftly
towards the three girls. They rose simultaneously to meet him.

In London, and in any other part of the south of England, the weather
was warm at this time of the year; but up on Craigie Muir it wa