Gowanbrae, in fact, was better adapted for summer than for winter. When the hills were covered with snow, the prospect was melancholy, and down by the burn, though it was lovely, it was damp in the autumn rains. The broad drive in the park between old Murkley and new, had always supplied a dry and cheerful walk, and even the well-gravelled road by the Tay was sumptuous in comparison with the muddy roads wending by farmsteadings over boggy soil towards the moors. Indoors, to be sure, all was cheerful, but even there disturbing imaginations would enter. Miss Jean would spend hours playing the music which Lewis had left with her, and which was a little above her powers. Her pretty "pieces," the gentle "reveries" and compositions that were quite within her range, the Scotch airs which she played so sweetly, were given up, with a little contempt and a great deal of ambition, for Mozart and Beethoven; and the result was not exhilarating. When Margaret said, "I would far rather hear your Scotch tunes," Jean would smile and sigh, with a little conscious pride in her own preference of the best, and play the "Flowers of the Forest" or "Tweedside" with an air of gentle condescension, which made her sister laugh, and took the charm out of the pretty performance, which once had been the pride of the house. As for Lilias, she was more indulgent to these reminiscences of the past. It did not trouble her, as it might have done had her ear been finer, to hear the stumbling and faltering of Jean's fingers in her attempt to render what the practised hands of the other had done so easily. On the contrary, in the long winter evenings, when the house was shut up by four o'clock, Lilias, with her book of poetry, whatever it might be--and her appetite was so large that she was not so fastidious as perhaps she ought to have been--half-buried in a deep easy-chair by the fire, would catch, as it were, an echo of the finer strain as her sister laboured at it, and liked it as it linked itself, broken yet full of association, with the other kind of music she was reading. Sometimes, when Margaret was absent, there would be a little colloquy between the pair. "That is bonnie, Jean. Play just that little bit again." "Which bit, my darling?--the beginning of the andante?" Miss Jean had learned from Lewis to speak more learnedly than was natural. "Oh, what do I know about your andantes? Play _that_--just that little flowery bit--it's like the meadows in the spring." "I wish Mr. Murray, poor lad, could have heard you call it that." "Why is he a poor lad? I thought he was very well off. You always speak of him in that little sighing tone." "Do I, my dear? Oh, he is well enough in fortune--but there are more things needed than fortune to make a young man happy." Upon which Lilias laughed, yet blushed as well--not for consciousness, but because she was at the stage when the very name of love brings the colour to a girl's cheek.