ek to
do him harm. At the House door she stood watching her father drive down
through the ragged firs to the highroad, and long after he had passed
out of sight she still stood gazing. Upon the church tower rising out of
its birches and its firs her eyes were resting, but her heart was
with the little mound at the tower's foot, and as she gazed, the tears
gathered and fell.

"Oh, Mother!" she whispered. "Mother, Mother! You know Allan would not
lie!"

A sudden storm was gathering. In a brief moment the world and the Glen
had changed. But half an hour ago and the Cuagh Oir was lying glorious
with its flowing gold. Now, from the Cuagh as from her world, the
flowing gold was gone.

CHAPTER III

THE FAMILY SOLICITOR

The senior member of the legal firm of Rae & Macpherson was perplexed
and annoyed, indeed angry, and angry chiefly because he was perplexed.
He resented such a condition of mind as reflecting upon his legal and
other acumen. Angry, too, he was because he had been forced to accept,
the previous day, a favour from a firm--Mr. Rae would not condescend to
say a rival firm--with which he for thirty years had maintained only
the most distant and formal relations, to wit, the firm of Thomlinson &
Shields. Messrs. Rae & Macpherson were family solicitors and for three
generations had been such; hence there gathered about the firm a fine
flavour of assured respectability which only the combination of solid
integrity and undoubted antiquity can give. Messrs. Rae & Macpherson had
not yielded in the slightest degree to that commercialising spirit
which would transform a respectable and self-respecting firm of family
solicitors into a mere financial agency; a transformation which Mr. Rae
would consider a degradation of an ancient and honourable profession.
This uncompromising attitude toward the commercialising spirit of the
age had doubtless something to do with their losing the solicitorship
for the Bank of Scotland, which went to the firm of Thomlinson &
Shields, to Mr. Rae's keen, though unacknowledged, disappointment;
a disappointment that arose not so much from the loss of the very
honourable and lucrative appointment, and more from the fact that the
appointment should go to such a firm as that of Thomlinson & Shields.
For the firm of Thomlinson & Shields were of recent origin, without
ancestry, boasting an existence of only some thirty-five years, and, as
one might expect of a firm of such recent origin,