fine, but Jock
loves best 'Don John of Austria.' You would like Jock. He has a very
gruff voice and such surprised blue eyes, and is fond of weird
interjections like 'Gosh, Maggie!' and 'Earls in the streets of Cork!'
He is a determined foe to sentiment. He won't read a book that contains
love-making or death-beds. 'Does anybody marry?' 'Does anybody die?' are
his first questions about a book, so naturally his reading is much
restricted.

"The Jardines have the lovable habit of becoming suddenly overpowered
with laughter, crumpled up, and helpless. You have it, too; I have it;
all really nice people have it. I have been refreshing myself with
_Irish Memories_ since dinner. Do you remember what is said of Martin
Ross? 'The large conventional jest had but small power over her; it was
the trivial absurdity, the inversion of the expected the sublimity
getting a little above itself and failing to realise that it had taken
that fatal step over the border--those were the things that felled her,
and laid her, wherever she might be, in ruins....'

"Bella Bathgate, I must tell you, remains unthawed. She hinted to me
to-night that she thought the Hydropathic was the place for me--surely
the unkindest cut of all. People dress for dinner every night there, she
tells me, and most of them are English, and a band plays. Evidently she
thinks I would be at home in such company.

"Some day I think you must visit Priorsford and get to know Miss
Bathgate.--Yours,

"PAM.

"I forgot to tell you that for some dark reason the Jardines call their
cat Sir J.M. Barrie.

"I asked why, but got no satisfaction.

"'Well, you see, there's Peter,' Mhor said vaguely.

"Jock looked at the cat and observed obscurely, 'It's not a sentimental
beast either'--while Jean asked if I would have preferred it called Sir
Rabindranath Tagore!"

CHAPTER V

"O, the land is fine, fine,
I could buy it a' for mine,
For ma gowd's as the stooks in Strathairlie."

_Scots Song._

When Peter Reid arrived at Priorsford Station from London he stood for a
few minutes looking about him in a lost way, almost as if after thirty
years he expected to see a "kent face" coming to meet him. He had no
-notion where to go; he had not written for rooms; he had simply obeyed
the impulse that sent him--the impulse that sends a hurt child to its
mother. It is said that an old horse near to death turns towards the
pastures where he was foaled. It is tr