was sinful and dangerous, vulgar and ungentlemanly,
giving the worst possible example to those beneath them! What could
their landlady think?--the very first night?--and a lodger whom he
had recommended? Such was the sort of thing with which Mr. Sclater
overwhelmed the two boys. Donal would have pleaded in
justification, or at least excuse, but he silenced him peremptorily.
I suspect there had been some difference between Mrs. Sclater and
him just before he left: how otherwise could he have so entirely
forgotten his wise resolves anent Gibbie's gradual subjugation?

When first he entered, Gibbie rose with his usual smile of greeting,
and got him a chair. But he waved aside the attention with
indignant indifference, and went on with his foolish
reproof--unworthy of record except for Gibbie's following behaviour.
Beaten down by the suddenness of the storm, Donal had never risen
from his chair, but sat glowering into the fire. He was annoyed,
vexed, half-ashamed; with that readiness of the poetic nature to fit
itself to any position, especially one suggested by an unjust
judgment, he felt, with the worthy parson thus storming at him,
almost as if guilty in everything laid to their joint charge.
Gibbie on his feet looked the minister straight in the face. His
smile of welcome, which had suddenly mingled itself with
bewilderment, gradually faded into one of concern, then of pity, and
by degrees died away altogether, leaving in its place a look of
question. More and more settled his countenance grew, while all the
time he never took his eyes off Mr. Sclater's, until its expression
at length was that of pitiful unconscious reproof, mingled with
sympathetic shame. He had never met anything like this before.
Nothing low like this--for all injustice, and especially all that
sort of thing which Janet called "dingin' the motes wi' the beam,"
is eternally low--had Gibbie seen in the holy temple of Glashgar!
He had no way of understanding or interpreting it save by calling
to his aid the sad knowledge of evil, gathered in his earliest
years. Except in the laird and Fergus and the gamekeeper, he had
not, since fleeing from Lucky Croale's houff, seen a trace of
unreasonable anger in any one he knew. Robert or Janet had never
scolded him. He might go and come as he pleased. The night was
sacred as the day in that dear house. His father, even when most
overcome by the wicked thing, had never scolded him!

The boys remai