hat many of
the old Shetland and Orkney families had gold ornaments and uncut
gems, hundreds of years old, hid away. I would not wonder if
Grandfather has some! I dare say the bank's safe is full of them! I do
not care for them but I do want my mother's wedding necklace--and I am
going to have it. Right and proper it is, I should have it now. Mother
would say so if she were here. Girls are women earlier than they were
in her day. Twenty-one, indeed! I expect to be married long before I
am twenty-one."

In less than an hour she began to watch the road for her grandfather's
return. Very soon she saw him coming and he had a small parcel in his
hand. Her heart gave a throb of satisfaction and she began to unplait
her manifold small braids: "I shall not require to go to bed," she
murmured. "Grandfather has my necklace. He will want to take it back
to the bank tomorrow--I shall see about that--I promised--yes, I know!
But there are ways--out of a promise."

She was, of course, delightfully grateful to receive the necklace, and
Vedder could not help noticing how beautiful her loosened hair
looked. Its length and thickness and waves of light colour gave to
her stately, blonde beauty a magical grace, and Vedder was one of
those men who admire the charms of his own family as something
naturally greater than the same charms in any other family. "The
Vedders carry their beauty with an air," he said, and he was right.
The Vedders during the course of a few centuries of social prominence
had acquired that air of superiority which impresses, and also
frequently offends.

Certainly, Sunna Vedder in white silk and a handsome necklace of
rubies and diamonds was an imposing picture; and Adam Vedder, in spite
of his sixty-two years, was an imposing escort. It would be difficult
to say why, for he was a small man in comparison with the towering
Norsemen by whom he was surrounded. Yet he dominated and directed any
company he chose to favour with his presence; and every man in
Kirkwall either feared or honoured him. Sunna had much of his natural
temperament, but she had not the driving power of his cultivated
intellect. She relied on her personal beauty and the many natural arts
with which Nature has made women a match for any antagonist. Had she
not heard her grandfather frequently say "a beautiful woman is the
best armed creature that God has made! She is as invincible as a
rhinoceros!"

This night he had paid great attention to his o