want her brought up a lady."

"There was a roll of gold in the basket with her, forty pounds, my
lord. And the writer has kept his word. Money has been sent ever since,
sometimes from Italy, once from Russia, and then from the Far East.
That is all that I know."

"But you have beliefs concerning the matter?" I asked.

"Yes," she said, "though the truth of them could not be proved. Twenty
years ago, when I was maid at Squire Eglinton's, on the Irish coast,
near Carrickfergus, he had one daughter, a flower of a girl, who ran
away with a gipsy man she met in her father's park. The young lady
loved me and knew where my home in Scotland was. I have thought, my
lord, that mayhap she died, and 'twas the father-man who brought the
baby to my door. I have told you all but this: if Miss Eileen ever had
a daughter, it could not be more like her than Marian is."

A hundred questions came to me at once, but before one of them was
asked I had a sight of the girl herself, coming from the country side
of the house, the wind blowing her hair about her face and carrying
away swarms of white petals from the hawthorn-blooms she held in her
arms. As she was hid from my sight by the corner of the house, Sandy
Carmichael entered the room, his hands thrust far into his pockets, and
his pipe held at a curious angle between his teeth.

"What!" I cried in amazement. "You here! I thought you were gone at
daylight."

"Did ye now?" he asked, with raillery in his voice. "Did ye think," and
he put his hand on my shoulder after his own fashion, "did you think
I'd leave you, Jock, in this, your last extremity? Ye're not married
yet?" he went on jokingly, "I'm not too late for the wedding? Oh," he
broke out with a laugh, "how have the mighty fallen!"

"Not yet," I answered him; "but it will be no fault of mine if I'm not
a married man by night."

He changed color at this, and getting the dame on his side the two of
them urged a waiting--I know not for what; and more thought, which
would have brought me to the same conclusion; but their talk and their
arguments went high over my head, for I was fixed as fate that nothing
but Marian's mind against it could move me from the wish I had. As the
three of us stood thus, the talk going back and forth, the girl came
into the room, and at sight of me went white, changing on the instant
to a glorious pink, which flushed her face all over like a rose.

"Good morning, Lord Stair," she said.

I crossed t