“But a laddie,” she repeated, determined not to see. “All the world’s before you, and a braw bonny world it is, for all its losses and its crosses. There is not a man of them at the inn door who would not willingly be in your shoes. The sour old remnants--do I not know them? Grant me patience with them!” “It was General Turner’s word,” said Gilian, utterly unconsoled, and he wondered for a moment to see her flush. “He might have had a kinder thought,” said she, “with his own affairs, as they tell me, much ajee, and Old Islay pressing for his loans. I’ll warrant you do not know anything of that, but it’s the clavers of the Crosswell.” She hurried on, glad to get upon a topic even so little away from what had vexed her darling. “Old Islay has his schemes, they say, to get Maam tacked on to his own tenancy of Drimlee and his son out of the army, and the biggest gentleman farmer in the shire. He has the ear of the Duke, and now he has Turner under his thumb. Oh my sorrow, what a place of greed and plot!” “That Turner said it, showed he thought it!” said Gilian, not a whit moved from bitter reflection upon his wounded feelings. “Amn’t I telling you?” said Miss Mary. “It’s just his own sorrows souring him. There’s Sandy, his son, a through-other lad (though I aye liked the laddie and he’s young yet), and his daughter back from her schooling in Edinburgh, educated, or polished, or finished off as they call it--I hope she kens what she’s to be after next, for I’m sure her father does not.” Gilian’s breast filled with some strange new sense of sudden relief. It was as if he had been climbing out of an airless, hopeless valley, and emerged upon a hill-crest, and was struck there by the flat hand of the lusty wind and stiffened into hearty interest in the rolling and variegated world around. In a second, the taunt of the General of Maam was no more to him than a dream. A dozen emotions mastered him, and he tingled from head to foot, for the first time man. “Oh, and _she’s_ back, is she?” said he with a crafty indifference, as one who expects no answer. Miss Mary was not deceived. She had moved to the window and was looking down into the street where the children played, but the new tone of his voice, and the pause before it, gave her a sense of desertion, and she grieved. On the ridges of the opposite lands, sea-gulls perched and preened their feathers, pigeons kissed each other as they moved about the feet of the passers-by. A servant lass bent over a window in the dwelling of Marget Maclean and smiled upon a young fisherman who went up the middle of the street, noisily in knee-high boots. The afternoon was glorious with sun. CHAPTER XXII--IN CHURCH