e began to suspect that, unlike her hand beside
his, she showed to some kind of disadvantage beside the shepherd
lad. Was it dissatisfaction then with herself that his look had
waked? She was aware of nothing in which she had failed or been in
the wrong of late. She never did anything to be called wrong--by
herself, that is, or indeed by her neighbours. She had never done
anything very wrong, she thought; and anything wrong she had done,
was now a far away and so nearly forgotten, that it seemed to have
left her almost quite innocent; yet the look of those blue eyes,
searching, searching, without seeming to know it, made her feel
something like the discomfort of a dream of expected visitors, with
her house not quite in a condition to receive them. She must see to
her hidden house. She must take dust-pan and broom and go about a
little. For there are purifications in which king and cowboy must
each serve himself. The things that come out of a man are they that
defile him, and to get rid of them, a man must go into himself, be a
convict, and scrub the floor of his cell. Mrs. Sclater's cell was
very tidy and respectable for a cell, but no human consciousness can
be clean, until it lies wide open to the eternal sun, and the
all-potent wind; until, from a dim-lighted cellar it becomes a
mountain-top.

CHAPTER XLI.

INITIATION.

Mrs. Sclater's first piece of business the following morning was to
take Gibbie to the most fashionable tailor in the city, and have him
measured for such clothes as she judged suitable for a gentleman's
son. As they went through the streets, going and returning, the
handsome lady walking with the youth in the queer country-made
clothes, attracted no little attention, and most of the inhabitants
who saw them, having by this time heard of the sudden importance of
their old acquaintance, wee Sir Gibbie, and the search after him,
were not long in divining the secret of the strange conjunction.
But although Gibbie seemed as much at home with the handsome lady
as if she had been his own mother, and walked by her side with a
step and air as free as the wind from Glashgar, he felt anything but
comfortable in his person. For here and there Tammy Breeks's seams
came too close to his skin, and there are certain kinds of hardship
which, though the sufferer be capable of the patience of Job, will
yet fret. Gibbie could endure cold or wet or hunger, and sing like
a mavis; he had borne pain u