ranite of his native hills, and then to build it into
houses, under another man's eye, and at another man's bidding. After a
time he took his turn, first as overseer, and then as master-builder,
and succeeded, and men began to speak of him as a rising man, and one
well-to-do in the world. All this was before he had got beyond middle
life.

Then he married a woman "much above him," it was said, but that was a
mistake. For though Marion Sinclair came of a good stock, and had all
her life lived in a home well placed and well plenished, among folk who
might have thought themselves, and whom others might have thought to be
John Beaton's superiors, yet no man or woman of them all had a right to
look down on John Beaton. He stood firm on his own feet, in a place
which his own hand had won. No step had he ever taken which he had
needed to go back upon, nor had he ever had cause to cast down his eyes
before the face of man because of any doubtful deed done, or false word
spoken.

And Marion Sinclair, no longer in her first youth, might well go a proud
and happy bride to the home of a man wise and strong, far-seeing,
honest, and successful--one who loved her dearly, as a man of middle age
may love, who in his youth has told himself that he had neither will nor
time for such sweet folly.

With all his strong and sterling qualities he was regarded by the world
in general, as, perhaps, a little hard and self-opinioned. But he was
never hard to her, or to the one son who was born to them. He exacted
what was his due from the rest of the world, but he was always soft and
yielding to them in all things. He was proud of his success and of his
good name in the countryside, and he offended some of those who came
into contact with him by letting his pride in all this be too plainly
seen. But he was prouder far of his wife, and his happy home, and of
his young son, with whom, to his thought, no prince in all the land
could compare.

And so it went well with him, till one day the end came suddenly. A
broken bank, a dishonoured name, scathe and scorn to some--to him among
the rest--who was, God knows, neither in deed nor in thought guilty of
the sin which had brought ruin upon thousands.

He made a gallant stand for his good name and his well-earned fortune,
and for his fellow-sufferers; but he was an old man by this time, and he
died of it.

Mrs Beaton had never all her life been a strong woman, and had never
needed to thin