I went over to where my two sisters and Miss Emery were sitting over the fire. Miss Emery was talking very fast, and Penelope listening with a slightly scornful lip; she protests that ladies, middle-aged ladies particularly, are such very stupid company. Lisabel wore her good-natured smile, always the same to everybody. "I was quite pleased," Miss Emery was saying, "to notice how cordially Captain Treherne and Mr. Charteris met: I always understood there was a sort of a--a coolness, in short. Very natural. As his nephew, and next heir, after the Captain, Sir William might have done more than he did for Mr. Charteris. So people said, at least. He has a splendid property, and only that one son. You have been to Treherne Court, Miss Johnston." Penelope abruptly answered, "No;" and Lisabel added amiably, that we seldom went from home--papa liked to have us at Rockmount all the year round. I said wilfully, wickedly,--may be, lest Miss Emery's long tongue should carry back to London what was by implication not true--that we did not even know where Treherne Court was, and that we had only met Captain Treherne accidentally among the camp-officers who visited at the Cedars. Lis pinched me: Penelope looked annoyed. Was it a highly virtuous act thus to have vexed both my sisters? Alack! I feel myself growing more unamiable every day. What will be the end of it? "First come, first served," must have been Lisabel's motto for the evening, since, Captain Treherne re-appearing, scarlet beat plain black clear out of the field. I was again obliged to follow, as Charity, pouring the oil and wine of my agreeable conversation into the wounds made by my sister's bright eyes, and receiving as gratitude such an amount of information on turnips, moor-lands, and the true art of sheep-feeding, as will make me look with respect and hesitation on every leg of mutton that comes to our table for the next six months.= ```"O, Colin, dear Colin, my Colin, my dear, ```Who wont the wild mountains to trace without fear, ```O, where are thy flocks that so swiftly rebound, ```And fly o'er the heath without touching the ground."= A remarkable fact in natural history, which much impressed me in my childhood. What is the rest?= ```"Where the birch-tree hangs weeping o'er fountain so `````clear, ```At noon I shall meet him, my Colin, my dear."= What a shame to laugh at Mrs. Grant of Laggan's nice old song, at the pretty Highland tune which ere now I have hummed over the moor for miles. Since, when we were children, I myself was in love with Colin! a love which found vent in much petting of his mother, and in shy presents to himself of nuts and blackberries: until, stung by indifference, my affection= `````"Shrunk ```Into itself, and was missing ever after."=