ce at all."

She did not laugh after this childish speech, but let her face settle
into perfect stillness--sadness indeed, for a shadow came over the
stillness. Mr Fraser sat watching the two with his amused old face, one
side of it twitching in the effort to suppress the smile which sought
to break from the useful half of his mouth. His gout could not have
been very bad just then.

"I see, Katie, what that long chin of yours is thinking," he said.

"What is my chin thinking, uncle?" she asked.

"That uncles are not always nice either. They snub little girls,
sometimes, don't they?"

"I know one who _is_ nice, all except one naughty leg."

She rose, as she said this, and going round to the back of his chair,
leaned over it, and kissed his forehead. The old man looked up to her
gratefully.

"Ah, Katie!" he said, "you may make game of an old man like me. But
don't try your tricks on Mr Forbes there. He won't stand them."

Alec blushed. Kate went back to her seat, and took up her duster again.

Alec was a little short-sighted, though he had never discovered it till
now. When Kate leaned over her uncle's chair, near which he was
sitting, he saw that she was still prettier than he had thought her
before.--There are few girls who to a short-sighted person look
prettier when they come closer; the fact being that the general intent
of the face, which the generalizing effect of the shortness of the
sight reveals, has ordinarily more of beauty in it than has yet been
carried out in detail; so that, as the girl approaches, one face seems
to melt away, and another, less beautiful, to dawn up through it.

But, as I have said, this was not Alec's experience with Kate; for,
whatever it might indicate, she looked prettier when she came nearer.
He found too that her great mass of hair, instead of being, as he had
thought, dull, was in reality full of glints and golden hints, as if
she had twisted up a handful of sunbeams with it in the morning, which,
before night, had faded a little, catching something of the duskiness
and shadowiness of their prison. One thing more he saw--that her
hand--she rested it on the back of the dark chair, and so it had caught
his eye--was small and white; and those were all the qualities Alec was
as yet capable of appreciating in a hand. Before she got back to her
seat, he was very nearly in love with her. I suspect that those
generally who fall in love at first sight have been in love before. At