The junior partner swung round on his stool and called, "Hey! boy, stop!" But Cleg was already outside. "Call that boy back!" he shouted to the watchman, leaping to the door with sudden agility and astonishing interest. Cleg returned with the same dejected mien and abased eyes. He stood, the image of sorrow and disappointment, upon the cocoa-nut matting. "Whom did you say you would tell?" said Donald Iverach, in a tone in his voice quite different from his business one. "Only Miss Tennant—a freend o' mine," said Cleg, with incomparable meekness and deference. "Miss Tennant of Aurelia Villa?" broke in the eager youth. "Aye, juist her," said Cleg dispassionately. "She learns us aboot Jacob and Esau—and aboot Noah," he added as if upon consideration. He would have mentioned more of the patriarchs if he could have remembered them at the time. His choice of names did not spring from either preference or favouritism. So he added Noah to show that there was no ill-feeling in the matter. "And Miss Tennant is your friend?" queried the young man. Cleg nodded. He might have added that sometimes, as in one great ploy yet to be described, he had been both teacher and friend to Miss Celie Tennant. "Tell your lassie to be here at breakfast-time to-morrow morning, and to be sure and ask for Mr. Donald Iverach," was all the junior partner remarked. And Cleg said demurely, "Thank you, sir." But as Cleg went out he thought a great deal of additional matter, and when he said his adieus to the watchman he could hardly contain himself. Before he was fairly down the steps, he yelled three times as loud as he could, and turned Catherine-wheel after Catherine-wheel, till at the last turn he came down with his bare feet in the waist-belt of a policeman. The good-natured officer solemnly smacked the convenient end of Cleg with a vast plantigrade palm, and restored him to the stature and progression of ordinary humanity, with a reminder to behave—and to mind where he was coming if he did not want to get run in. But even this did not settle Cleg. "O Keelies!" he cried, as if he had been addressing a large company of his fellows, "wasna it rare to see him loup off that stool, like a yellow paddock into the canal!" And Cleg, who scorned the eccentricities of love in more mature bosoms even when he traded upon the resultant weaknesses, went off into an ecstasy of mocking laughter. ADVENTURE XV. THE FIRE IN CALLENDAR'S YARD. Vara Kavannah went daily to the factory at Hillside. She was but a slip of a thing, yet she soon learned the work that fell to her share, and developed marvellous quickness in passing the thin quires of foreign paper, examining them for flaws and dirt, and rejecting the faulty sheets.