This adjuration was replied to by a burst of laughter in many voices, and a “Never fear, mother,” from Andrew; but Mrs. MacKell shook her good-looking head as she accepted Edgar’s hand to ascend the slope. All the kindred regarded Edgar with a mixture of curiosity and awe, and it was, perhaps, a slight nervous shyness in respect to this stranger, so aristocratical-looking, as Mrs. MacKell expressed herself, which gave a little additional loudness and apparent gaiety to that excellent woman’s first address. “I’m always afraid of those sails. They’re very uncanny sort of things when a person does not quite understand the nature of our lochs. I suppose, Mr. Edgar, you’re in that case?” said Mrs. MacKell, looking at him with an ingratiating smile. He was her nephew, there could be no doubt of it, and she had a right to talk to him familiarly; but at the same time he was a fine gentleman and a stranger, and made an impression upon her mind which was but inadequately counter-balanced by any self-assurances that he was “just an orphan lad--no better--not to say a great deal worse off than our own bairns.” Such representations did not affect the question as they ought to have done, when this strange personage, “no better, not to say a great deal worse” than themselves, stood with his smile which made them slightly uncomfortable, before them. It was the most open and genial smile, and in former times Edgar had been supposed a great deal too much disposed to place himself on a level with all sorts of people; but now-a-days his look embarrassed his humble relations. There was a certain amusement in it, which bore no reference to them, which was entirely at himself, and the quaintly novel position in which he found himself, but which nevertheless affected them, nobody could have told why. He was not laughing at them, respectablest of people. They could not take offence, neither could they divine what he was laughing at; but the curious, whimsical, and often rueful amusement which mingled with many much less agreeable feelings, somehow made itself felt and produced an effect upon which he had never calculated. It was something they did not understand, and this consciousness partially irritated, partially awed these good people, who felt that the new man in their midst was a being beyond their comprehension. They respected his history and his previous position, though with a little of that characteristic contempt which mingles so strangely in Scotland with many old prejudices in favour of rank and family; they respected more honestly and entirely his little property, the scraps of his former high estate which made him still independent; but above all they now respected, though with some irritation, what seemed to them the unfathomableness of his character, the lurking smile in his eyes. It confirmed the superiority which imagination already acknowledged.