Mary and Ellinor looked at each other with a little expression of surprise and bewilderment in their faces, and both felt that Blanche Galloway had, to say the least of it, disappointed them by her general style. Their emotions varied--one moment they felt flattered and pleased by the recognition of their own position and that once held by their parents in society which the sudden visit from the ladies of the great house implied. At another moment they felt the reverse--feared they were being patronised, and thought they should decline the invitation. Yet why? To do so would be, perhaps, to adopt the position of an inferior; and the invitation might be the result of real kindness of heart, after all. They knew not that they were indebted for the whole affair chiefly to a few friendly remarks made by Lord Dunkeld, and more especially by Leslie Colville, though those of the latter caused some afterthoughts. 'Men are very weak,' surmised Lady Dunkeld; 'but, of course, a man in Captain Colville's position can mean nothing more than simplest kindness, but the girls are pretty--unfortunately for themselves, I think, more than pretty.' The pride, admiration, and half-alarm of Elspat Gordon and other old servitors on the subject of the visit, which proved their nine days' wonder, amused while it annoyed Mary. She had her own ideas--it might be fears for the future--and, though she said little, she thought a good deal. The acceptances were written and despatched; and costumes were the next thing to be considered for the entertainment, of which Robert Wodrow heard the tidings with a very dark expression in his face indeed. 'Of what are you thinking, Ellinor?' asked Mary, softly, seeing the dark eyes of her sister fixed apparently on vacancy. 'Only of how differently the lives of some of us are allotted, and how pleasantly some people are circumstanced, compared with others.' 'Meaning ourselves and such as Blanche Galloway?' 'Well, yes.' 'Never mind, Ellinor dear,' replied Mary; 'I always say, blessed be God for all His gifts,' she added, thinking of the legend over the old doorway. CHAPTER VII. DREAMS AND DOUBTS. The sun of a soft and balmy summer afternoon was, as the song has it, 'Glinting bright On Invermay's sweet glen and stream,' on all the silver birches that grow thereby, on the rocky gullies through which the stream gurgles and babbles as it forces a passage towards the Earn, and on the green mound of the Holy Hill, of which its ceaseless current has swept so much away, when Mary Wellwood, alone, or attended only by her dog, and full of her own happy and innocent day-dreams, took a narrow path that leads northward down the side of the sylvan strath.