his petted little lady? Jamie had half-thoughts of training
some nice lad to be fit for her,--Jamie earned money amply; of
training him, too, to take his place and earn his salary. Every
discontented look in Mercedes' lovely face went to Jamie's
heartstrings.

One day, going home by the usual boat, he saw his dear girl waiting
for him on the wharf. It always lightened Jamie's heart when she did
this, and he hurried down to the gangplank, to be among the first
ashore and save her waiting. But as he stepped upon it he saw that she
was talking to a gentleman. There was a little heightened color in her
cheeks; she was not watching the passengers in the boat. Jamie turned
aside through the crowd to walk up the road alone. He looked over his
shoulder, and saw that they were following. When nearly at their
cottage, he turned about irresolutely and met them. Mercedes, with a
word of reproach for walking home alone (at which Jamie's old eyes
opened), introduced him: "Mr. David St. Clair--my father."

"I made Miss McMurtagh's acquaintance at the Rockland House last
night,--she plays so beautifully." Then Jamie remembered that he had
gone out to smoke his pipe upon the piazza.

He looked at the newcomer. St. Clair was dressed expensively, in what
Jamie thought the highest fashion. He wore kid gloves and a high silk
hat; he had a white waistcoat and a very black mustache. Mercedes had
blushed again when she presented him, and suddenly there was a burst
of envy in poor Jamie's heart.

II.

No girl, before she came to love, ever scrutinized a suitor so closely
as old Jamie did St. Clair. The little old Scotch clerk was quicker
far to see the first blossoms of love in her heart than Mercedes
herself, than any mother could have been, for each one bore a pang for
him; and he, who had renounced, and then set his heart to share each
feeling with her, who had wanted but her confidence, wanted but to
share with her as some girl might her heart histories, now found
himself far outstripping her in conscious knowledge. He did not
realize the impossibility of the sympathy he dreamed. He had fondly
thought his man's love a justification for that intimacy from which,
in natures like Mercedes', even a mother's love is excluded.

All Jamie's judgment was against the man, and yet his heart was in
touch with hers to feel its stirring for him. The one told him he was
not respectable; the other that he was romantic. His career was
shado