'He looked as I say, tired, thin, and hollow-eyed. But when I tried mildly to remonstrate, and show that he had made the change for the worse, he fired up briskly enough, and held forth quite at length. He might have been talking still, I daresay, but that just then, there came a squeal from a parcel he carried on his saddle bow. I pricked up my ears at that, and resolved to take _my_ innings then. He had been discoursing on the solemnity of his avocations, which precluded shooting and fishing, so here I had a fine opening for chaff, saying that his presbytery might reasonably forbid these, seeing that it allowed other pastimes so much more engrossing, for--saving your presence, Lady Caroline--the bundle contained a baby! Poor fellow, he seemed so put-out, I really did not catch his explanation--though of course there was one, (there always is--) The confusion seemed quite out of proportion, for after all as the French girl said to her priest, "it was such a little one!" Ha, ha!!' But no one joined in the laugh. The ladies were examining the flowers painted on their plates, and the gentlemen kept a severe silence. You surely went too far there! Captain John! Good man. He loved to make a joke, but it was not often that he achieved one. If desire had been qualification, he would certainly have been a wit; and when he thought he had achieved one, he repeated it till every one he knew had heard it. Hence the repetition of the morning's rather thread-bare jest. Perhaps it was only to break an awkward silence that Miss Finlayson took up the word. 'Your woman Briggs tells me, Lady Caroline, that that Tirpie girl, old Tibbie's daughter, has come home again. When Briggs came over from Inverlyon last night, there was some one else in the stage-coach, all wrapped up, who sat and cried the whole way. She got out at Tibbie's cottage. This morning Briggs went over about some sewing, and there was the girl looking so thin and pale. Briggs says it was distressing to see her, she looked so weak and heart-broken. Perhaps you may remember that she was ailing and went away to some friend at a distance. Now she is home again. I fear she is not a good girl, at least not all her mother would wish her to be. But perhaps you could let her have some fine sewing, Briggs says any other kind of work would be too much for her.' The boisterous unmannerliness of Captain John's remark had caused a sensation, but it was as nothing to the dismay which followed Miss Finlayson's perfectly quiet, evenly uttered, and perhaps charitably intended words. She seemed virtuously unconscious of all evil, but by some occult association of ideas, her statement fell into the minds of her auditors as corroborative and supplementary to what had been meant but as a little verbal horse play by the Captain.