ittle to say to me. But he's got no such notion. He
comes here because, being human, he's got to open his mouth some time or
other, I suppose; but it's my opinion he has neither Advena nor anybody
else in his mind's eye at present. He doesn't go the right way about
it."

"H'm!" said John Murchison.

"He brought her a book the last time he came--what do you think the name
of it was? The something or other of Plato! Do you call that a natural
gift from a young man who is thinking seriously of a girl? Besides, if
I know anything about Plato he was a Greek heathen, and no writer for
a Presbyterian minister to go lending around. I'd Plato him to the
rightabout if it was me!"

"She might read worse than Plato," remarked John.

"Oh, well, she read it fast enough. She's your own daughter for
outlandish books. Mercy on us, here comes the man! We'll just say 'How
d'ye do?' to him, and then start for Abby's, John. I'm not easy in my
mind about the baby, and I haven't been over since the morning. Harry
says it's nothing but stomach, but I think I know whooping-cough when I
hear it. And if it is whooping-cough the boy will have to come here
and rampage, I suppose, till they're clear of it. There's some use in
grandmothers, if I do say it myself!"

CHAPTER XIV

If anyone had told Mr Hugh Finlay, while he was pursuing his rigorous
path to the ideals of the University of Edinburgh, that the first
notable interest of his life in the calling and the country to which
even then he had given his future would lie in his relations with any
woman, he would have treated the prediction as mere folly. To go far
enough back in accounting for this one would arrive at the female sort,
sterling and arid, that had presided over his childhood and represented
the sex to his youth, the Aunt Lizzie, widowed and frugal and spare, who
had brought him up; the Janet Wilson, who had washed and mended him from
babyhood, good gaunt creature half-servant and half-friend--the mature
respectable women and impossible blowsy girls of the Dumfriesshire
village whence he came. With such as these relations, actual or
imagined, could only be of the most practical kind, matters to be
arranged on grounds of expediency, and certainly not of the first
importance. The things of first importance--what you could do with your
energy and your brains to beat out some microscopic good for the
world, and what you could see and feel and realize in it of value to
yoursel