s, and of our being obliged to part with the old home we had
loved so well, and never to utter a word about his having bought the
place."

"Perhaps," suggested Flora, "you had not mentioned the name of the
place, and so it might not have occurred to him that--"

"Oh yes, I did," interrupted her father, with increasing anger, as his
memory recalled the converse with Redding on the preceding night, "I
remember it well, for he asked the name, and I told it him. It's not
that I care a straw whether the old place was bought by Tom, Dick, or
Harry, but I can't stand his having concealed the fact from me after so
much, I may say, confidential conversation about it and our affairs
generally. When I meet him again the young coxcomb shall have a piece
of my mind."

McLeod was, as we have said, an angry man, and, as the intelligent
reader well knows, angry men are apt to blind themselves and to become
outrageously unreasonable. He was wrong in supposing that he did not
care a straw who should have bought the old place. Without, perhaps,
admitting it to himself, he had entertained a hope that the home which
was intimately associated with his wife, and in which some of the
happiest years of his life had been spent, would remain unsold until he
should manage to scrape together money enough to repurchase it. If it
had been sold to the proverbial Tom, or Dick, or Harry, he would have
been bitterly disappointed; the fact that it was sold to one who had, as
he thought, deceived him while enjoying his hospitality, only served as
a reason for his finding relief to disappointment in indignation.
Flora, who had entertained similar hopes in regard to Loch Dhu, shared
the disappointment, but not the indignation, for, although it did seem
unaccountable that one so evidently candid and truthful as Redding
should conceal the actual state of matters, she felt certain that there
was some satisfactory explanation of the mystery, and in that state of
mind she determined to remain until time should throw further light on
the affair.

Neither she nor her father happened to remember that the truth had
broken on Redding at the moment when the Indian entered the hut at
Jenkins Creek with the news of the wreck, which created such a sudden
excitement there that it banished thoughts of all other things from the
minds of every one.

The elder McLeod was a man of very strong and sensitive feelings, so
that, although possessed of an amiable and kindl