“He can keep his looks to himsel,” said Katie angrily, as the wheel _birled_ under her impatient hand. “It was only to please ye a’ that I let him come hame with me last night; and he’s no a bonnie lad, and I dinna care for him, Janet.” Janet, with the firelight reddening that round, stout, ruddy arm, with which she lifts from the crook the suspended kettle, pauses in the act to look into Katie’s face. The eyelashes tremble on the flushed cheek—the head is drooping—poor little Katie could almost cry with vexation and shame. Merran is away to the field—the sisters are alone; but Janet only ventures to laugh a little as she goes with some bustle about her work, and records Katie’s blush and Katie’s anger for the encouragement of Willie Morison. Janet, who is experienced in such matters, thinks these are good signs. And the forenoon glides away, while Katie sits absorbed and silent, turning the pretty wheel, and musing on all these affronts which have been put upon her. Not the first by many days on which Willie Morison has dared to think of her! And she remembers Sir Alexander, and that moonlight night on which she watched him looking up at Lady Anne Erskine’s window, but very faintly, very indifferently, comes before her the dim outline of the youthful knight; whereas most clearly visible in his blue jacket, and with the fair hair blown back from his ruddy, manly face, appears this intruder, this Willie Morison. The days are growing short. Very soon now the dim clouds of the night droop over these afternoon hours in which Mrs Stewart says, “Naebody can ever settle to wark.” It is just cold enough to make the people out of doors brisk in their pace, and to quicken the blood it exhilarates; and the voices of the field-labourers calling to each other as the women gather up the potato baskets and hoes which they have used in their work, and the men loose their horses from the plough, and lead them home, ring into the air with a clear musical cadence which they have not at any other time. Over the dark Firth, from which now and then you catch a long glistening gleam, which alone in the darkness tells you it is there, now suddenly blazes forth that beacon on the May. Not a sober light, shining under glass cases with the reflectors of science behind, but an immense fire piled high up in that iron cage which crowns the strong grey tower; a fiery, livid, desperate light, reddening the dark waters which welter and plunge below, so that you can fancy it rather the torch of a forlorn hope, fiercely gleaming upon ships dismasted and despairing men, than the soft clear lamp of help and kindness guiding the coming and going passenger through a dangerous way.