n in Gormgarnet. There he fell into the hands of a
certain man, whose true place would have been in the swell mob, and
not in the House of Commons--a fellow who used his influence and
facilities as member of Parliament in promoting bubble companies.
He was intimate with an elder brother of the laird, himself member
for a not unimportant borough--a man, likewise, of principles that
love the shade; and between them they had no difficulty in making a
tool of Thomas Galbraith, as chairman of a certain aggregate of
iniquity, whose designation will not, in some families, be forgotten
for a century or so. During the summer, therefore, the laird was
from home, working up the company, hoping much from it, and trying
hard to believe in it--whipping up its cream, and perhaps himself
taking the froth, certainly doing his best to make others take it,
for an increase of genuine substance. He devoted the chamber of his
imagination to the service of Mammon, and the brownie he kept there
played him fine pranks.

A smaller change, though of really greater importance in the end,
was, that in the course of the winter, one of Donal's sisters was
engaged by the housekeeper at Glashruach, chiefly to wait upon Miss
Galbraith. Ginevra was still a silent, simple, unconsciously
retiring, and therewith dignified girl, in whom childhood and
womanhood had begun to interchange hues, as it were with the play of
colours in a dove's neck. Happy they in whom neither has a final
victory! Happy also all who have such women to love! At one moment
Ginevra would draw herself up--bridle her grandmother would have
called it--with involuntary recoil from doubtful approach; the next,
Ginny would burst out in a merry laugh at something in which only a
child could have perceived the mirth-causing element; then again the
woman would seem suddenly to re-enter and rebuke the child, for the
sparkle would fade from her eyes, and she would look solemn, and
even a little sad. The people about the place loved her, but from
the stillness on the general surface of her behaviour, the far away
feeling she gave them, and the impossibility of divining how she was
thinking except she chose to unbosom herself, they were all a little
afraid of her as well. They did not acknowledge, even to
themselves, that her evident conscientiousness bore no small part in
causing that slight uneasiness of which they were aware in her
presence. Possibly it roused in some of them such a