All the time, however, Gilian was luckily more or less separate from his company by many miles of fancy, behind the hills among the lochs watching the uprising of Nan, sharing her loneliness, seeing her feet brush the dew from the scented gall. But the Cornal’s allusion brought him to the parlour of his banishment, away from that dear presence. He listened now but said nothing. He feared his very accent would betray his secret. “I’ll tell you what it is,” said the Cornal again, “whoever is with her will rue it; mind, I’m telling you. It’s like mother like child.” “I’m glad,” said the Paymaster, “I had nothing to do with the sex of them.” He puffed up as he spoke it; there was an irresistible comedy in the complacence of a man no woman was ever like to run after at his best. His sister looked at him; his brother chuckled noiselessly. “You--you--you----” said the elder brother grimly, but again he did not finish the sentence. The meal went on for a time without any speech, finished, and Miss Mary cried at the stair-head for her maid, who came up and sat demurely at the chair nearest the door while the Cornal, as hurriedly as he might, ran over the morning’s sacred exercise from the Bible Miss Mary laid before him. The Paymaster took his seat beside the window, looking out the while and heedless of the Scriptures, watched the fishermen crowding for their mornings into the house of Widow Gordon the vintner. Miss Mary stole glances at her youth, the maid Peggy fidgeted because she had left the pantry door open and the cat was in the neighbourhood. As the old man’s voice monotonously occupied the room, working its way mumblingly through the end of Exodus, conveying no meaning to the audience, Gilian heard the moor-fowl cry beside Little Fox. The dazzle of the sunshine, the sparkle of the water, the girl inhabiting that solitary spot, seemed very real before him, and this dolorous routine of the elderly in a parlour no more than a dream from which he would waken to find himself with the girl he loved. Upon his knees beside his chair while the Cornal gruffly repeated the morning prayer he learned from his father, he remained the remote wanderer of fancy, and Miss Mary knew it by the instinct of affection as she looked at the side of his face through eyelids discreetly closed but not utterly fastened. The worship was no sooner over than Gilian was for off after Miss Mary to her own room, but the Paymaster stayed him with some cold business query about the farm, and handed him a letter from a low-country wool merchant relative to some old transaction still unsettled. Gilian read it, and the brothers standing by the window resumed their talk about the missing girl: it was the subject inspired by every glance into the street where each passerby, each loiterer at a close mouth, was obviously canvassing the latest news.