Red Rowans. Flora Annie Webster Steel

it was Mistress Macniven wass tellin' it to me, and it iss me that iss tellin' it to Mr. McColl, and it is fine news--tamn me, but it is fine news whatever."

      A twinkle came to Marjory's eyes, for in her character of Grand Inquisitress to the Glen, such startling language was too evidently a drag across the trail.

      "But where did Mrs. Macniven hear it?"

      "Aye! aye!" assented Donald, rising to go abruptly, "that is what it will be, but she was tellin' it to me, whatever."

      "I don't believe a word of it," continued the girl; "Captain Macleod would have written to my cousin, I know. It is just idle gossip."

      This was too much for the postmaster, who posed, as well as he might, for being an authority on such questions. In the present instance he preferred the truth to incredulity.

      '"Deed, Miss Marjory," he said, with unblushing effrontery, "it'll just be one o' they postcards."

      "Hou-ay!" echoed Donald, softly. "She'll be yon o' they postcards, whatever."

      "A postcard! What postcard?"

      Mr. McColl handed her one with the air of a man who has done his duty. "Will you be taking it with you, or shall I be giving it to Donald, here?"

      Marjory looked at him with speechless indignation; at least, she trusted that was her expression, though the keen sense of humour, which is the natural heritage of the Celt, struggled with her dignity at first.

      "I am really ashamed of you, Mr. McColl," she said at last, with becoming severity. "Of you and Mrs. Macniven; you ought to know better than pry into other folks' secrets."

      But now that the cat was out of the bag, the postmaster showed fight. "'Deed, and I'm no for seeing it was a secret at all! It is a penny people will be paying if they're needin' secrets. And the laird is not so poor, but he would put a penny to it if he was caring; though yon crabbed writin' they teach the gentlefolk nowadays, is as most as gude as an envelope. Lorsh me! Miss Marjory, but my laddies would be gettin' tawse for a postcard like yon. It was just awful ill to read."

      "To read! Mr. McColl, I really am surprised at you! It is most dishonourable to read other people's letters," protested the girl, with great heat.

      "Surely! Surely! but yon's a postcard."

      From this position he refused to budge an inch, being backed up in it by Donald, who, being unable to read, was busy in stowing away various letters in different hiding-places in his person, with a view to their future safe delivery at the proper destination. "It was a ferry useful thing," he said, "was postcards, and if Miss Marjory would mind it wass, when old Mistress Macgregor died her sons wass sending to Oban for the whiskey to come by the ferry. But it wass the day before the buryin' that a postcard wass coming to say the whiskey was to be at the pier. But young Peter's cart wass going to the ferry to fetch the whiskey and he was meeting Peter and telling him of the postcard. So if it had not been for the postcaird it wass no whiskey they would be having to Mistress Macgregor's funeral, whatever." A judicious mingling of fact and fiction which outlasted Marjory's wrath. She put the cause of offence in her pocket, remarking pointedly that as Donald had such a budget of important news to retail, that would most likely be the quickest mode of delivery, and then turned to her task of giving the children their usual Sunday lesson, which she began with such a detailed homily on the duty towards your neighbour, that Mr. McColl took the excuse of Donald's departure to accompany him into the garden, and remain there until she passed on to another subject.

      For Marjory Carmichael ruled the Glen absolutely; perhaps because she was the only young lady in it. Girls there were and plenty, but none in her own class of life, and the result on her character had been to make her at once confident and unconscious of her own powers. She was not, for instance, at all aware what a very learned young person she was, and the fact that she had been taught the differential calculus and the theory of Greek accents affected her no more than it affects the average young man of one-and-twenty. The consequence being a restfulness which, as a rule, is sadly wanting in the clever girls of the period, who never can forget their own superiority to the mass of their female relations. Having been brought up entirely among men, her strongest characteristic was not unnaturally an emotional reserve, and up to the present her life had been pre-eminently favourable to the preservation of that bloom which is as great a charm to a girl as it is to a flower, and which morbid self-introspection utterly destroys. To tell the truth, however, she was apt to be over contemptuous of gush, while her hatred of scenes was quite masculine. In fact, at one-and-twenty, Marjory knew more about her head than her heart, chiefly because, as yet, the call on her affections had been very small. Her father, a shiftless delicate dreamer, brought up by a brother years his senior, had married against that brother's wish, the offence being aggravated by the fact that the bride with whom he ran away was his brother's ward. One of those calm but absolutely hopeless quarrels ensued which come sometimes to divide one portion of a family from the other, without apparently much regret on either side. The young couple had the butterfly instinct, and lived for the present. They also had the faculty for making friends in a light airy fashion, and after various vicissitudes, borne with the gayest good temper, some one managed to find him a post as consul in some odd little seaport in the south, where sunshine kept them alive and contented until Marjory chose to put in an appearance and cost her mother's life. The blow seemed to make the husband still more dreamy and unpractical than ever, and, when cholera carried him off suddenly four years afterwards, he made no provision whatever for the child's future, save a scrawl, written with difficulty at the last moment, begging his brother to look after Marjory for the sake of old times.

      Perhaps it was the best thing he could have done, since nothing short of despair would have affected Dr. Carmichael, who had by this time become so absorbed in the effort to understand life that he had almost forgotten how to feel it. People wondered why a man, who had gained a European reputation for his researches, should have cared to linger on in a remote country district like Gleneira, and some went so far as to hint that something more than mere displeasure at his brother's disobedience lay at the bottom of his dislike to the marriage and his subsequent misanthropy.

      Be that as it may, his first look at little Marjory's curly head was absolutely unemotional, and he remarked to his housekeeper that it was a good thing she seemed to take more after her mother than her father, who had always been a cause of anxiety. For the rest, it was a pity she was not a boy. Orphans should always be boys; it simplified matters so much for the relations. However, Mrs. Campbell, the housekeeper, must make the best of it, and bring her up as a girl. He could not.

      But Marjory took a different view of the situation, and before six months had passed it dawned upon the Doctor that, as often as not, she was trotting round with her doll in his shadow as he paced the garden, or sitting in a corner of his study intent on some game of her own.

      She was a singularly silent unobjectionable child at such times; at others, if he might judge from the sounds that reached him, quite the reverse. He laid down his pen to watch her as she sate in the sunshine by the window one day, and heard her instantly tell her doll, that if she was naughty and disturbed Dr. Carmichael she must be sent into the garden. Another day he came upon her in his chair poring over a Greek treatise in an attitude which even he recognised as a faithful copy of his own. Finally, he discovered that she had taught her doll to draw geometrical figures such as she often saw on the papers littered about the room. This palpable preference for him and his occupations being distinctly flattering, he began to take more notice of her, and try experiments with her memory. So, by degrees, becoming interested in her quick intelligence, he deliberately began to educate her, as he would have educated a boy, with a view to her making her own living in the future. As indeed she would have to do, in the event of his death; since years before her advent he had sunk all his private means in an annuity, and the expenses of his scientific work did not allow of his saving much. The prospect neither pleased nor displeased the girl. It came simply, naturally, to her, as it does to a boy. On the other hand, she certainly worked harder than any boy would have done, partly because she took it for granted that the tasks set her by Dr. Carmichael were very ordinary ones, and partly because of that feminine tolerance of mere drudgery which makes it so difficult to compare the intellectual work of a man and a woman. For