He laughed loudly; he could not help it at so prosaic a conclusion. “What carry-on is that on the stair on a Lord’s day?” cried the Paymaster angrily and roughly from his room as he tugged short-tempered at the buckle of his Sabbath stock. “Then there’s something bothering you, my dear,” said Miss Mary again, paying no heed to the interruption. And Gilian could not release his arm from her restraint. “Is there, Auntie?” said he. “Perhaps. And still I could not name it. Come, come, what’s the sense of querying a man upon his moods?” “A man!” said Miss Mary. “On the verge at least,” said he, with a confidence he had never had in his voice before, taking a full breath in his chest. “A man!” said she again. And she saw, as if a curtain had fallen from before her eyes, that this was no more the fair-haired, wan-faced, trembling child who came from Ladyfield to her heart. “I wish, I wish,” said she all trembling, “the children did not grow at all!” CHAPTER XXIV--MAAM HOUSE Maam House stands mid-way up the Glen, among pasture and arable land that seems the more rich and level because it is hemmed in by gaunt hills where of old the robber found a sequestration, and the hunter of deer followed his kingly recreation. The river sings and cries, almost at the door, mellow in the linns and pools, or in its shallow links cheerily gossiping among grey stones; the Dhu Loch shines upon its surface like a looking-glass or shivers in icy winds. Round about the bulrush nods; old great trees stand in the rains knee-deep like the cattle upon its marge pondering, and the breath of oak and hazel hangs from shore to shore. To her window in the old house of Maam would Nan come in the mornings, and the beauty of Dhu Loch would quell the song upon her lips. It touched her with some melancholy influence. Grown tall and elegant, her hair in waves about her ears, in a rich restrained tumult about her head, her eyes brimming and full of fire, her lips rich, her bosom generous--she was not the Nan who swung upon a gate and wished that hers was a soldier’s fortune. This place lay in her spirit like a tombstone--the loneliness of it, the stillness of it, the dragging days of it, with their dreary round of domestic duties. She was not a week home, and already sleep was her dearest friend, and to open her eyes in the morning upon the sunny but silent room and miss the clangour of Edinburgh streets was a diurnal grief.