Again the Cornal bent and looked more closely, lifting her chin up that he might see the better. She flashed a glance of defiance in his scarred old parchment face, and he drew his hand back as if he had been stung. “Nan! Nan!” cried he, with a curious voice. “What witchery is this?” He was in a tremble, Then he started and laughed bitterly. “Oh no, not Nan!” said he. “Oh no, not Nan!” with the most rueful accent, almost chanting it as if it were a dirge. “‘It _is_ Nan,” said Gilian. “It is her breathing image,” said the old man. “It is Nan, no doubt, but not the Nan I knew.” She turned and sped home by the seaside, without farewell, alarmed at this oddity, and Gilian and the Cornal stood alone, the Cornal looking after her with a wistfulness in his very attitude. “The same, the same, the very same!” said he to himself, in words the boy could plainly hear. “Her mother to the very defiance of her eye.” He clutched Gilian rudely by the shoulder. “What,” said he; “were you wandering about with that girl for? Answer me that. They told me you were off after the soldiers, and I came up here hoping it true. It would have been the daft but likeable cantrip I should have forgiven in any boy of mine; it would have shown some sign of a sogerly emprise. And here you are, with a lass wandering! Where were you?” Gilian explained. “In the flower garden? Ay! ay! A lassie on the roadside met your fancy more than Geordie’s men of war. Thank God, I was never like that! And Turner’s daughter above all! If she’s like her mother in her heart as she’s like her in the face, it might be a bitter notion for your future.” He led the way home, muttering to himself. “Nan! Nan! It gave me the start! It was nearly a stroke for me! The same look about her! She is dead, dead and buried, and in her daughter she defies us still!” CHAPTER XIV--THE CORNAL’S LOVE STORY Miss Mary, in great tribulation, was waiting on them at the stair-foot, her face, with all its trouble in dark and throbbing lines, lit up by the lamp above the merchant’s door. When she saw her brother coming with Gilian she ran forward on the footway, caught the boy by the hand and drew him in. “I am very angry, oh, I am terribly angry with you!” she cried. “Do not speak a word to me.” She pushed him into a chair and spread thick butter on a scone and thrust it in his hand. “To frighten us like this! The Captain is all over the town for you, and the General has sent men to drag for you about the quay.” Peggy the maid smiled over her mistress’s shoulder at the youth. He ate his scone with great complacency, heartened by this token that something of Miss Mary’s vexation was assumed. Not perhaps her vexation--for were her eyes not red as with weeping?--but her anger, if she had really been angry. “You are a perfect heartbreak,” she went on “The Cornal heard you had run off after the sogers, and------” “Would that vex you?” asked Gilian.