attitude, that to feel yourself thrust aside into a crowd of nobodies when you know your place to be with the best, is trying. Some people succeed in bearing it with a smile, but the smile is seldom warm or of a genial character. And Drumcarro, at the bottom of the room, struggling to get forward, seeing the fine company at the other end, and invariably, persistently, he scarcely knew how, put back among the crowd, was not capable of that superlative amiability. The surprise of it partially subdued him for a time, and Miss Eelen’s exertions, who got him by the arm, and endeavoured to make him hear reason. “Drumcarro! bless the man--can ye not be content where ye are? Yon’s just the visitors, chiefly from England and foreign parts--earls and dukes, and such like.” “Confound the earls and the dukes! what’s their titles and their visitors to me? The Douglases have held their own and more for as many hundred years----” “Whisht, whisht, for mercy’s sake! Lord, ye’ll have all the folk staring as if we were some ferly. Everybody knows who the Douglases were; but man, mind the way of the world that ye are just as much affected by as any person. Riches and titles take the crown of the causeway. We have to put up with it whether we like it or no. You’re fond of money and moneyed folk yourself----” “Haud your fuilish tongue, ye know nothing about it,” said Drumcarro. But then he felt that he had gone too far. “I’m so used to my wife I forget who I’m speaking to. You’ll excuse me, Eelen?” “The Lord be praised I’m not your wife,” said Miss Eelen devoutly. She added, perceiving a vacant chair a little higher up near the edge of the privileged line, “I see my harbour, Drumcarro, and there I’ll go, but no further;” and with an able dive through the throng and long experience of the best methods, managed adroitly to settle herself there. She caught by the elbow as she made her dart a gentleman who stood by, a man with grey hair still dressed in a black silk bag in the old-fashioned way which was no longer the mode. “Glendochart,” she said, “one word. I’m wanting your help; you were always on the Douglas’ side.” “Miss Eelen?” he cried with a little surprise, turning round. He was a man between fifty and sixty, with a fresh colour and gentle, friendly air, much better dressed and set up than Drumcarro, but yet with something of the look of a man more accustomed to the hill-side and the moor than to the world. “For gudesake look to my cousin Neil, of Drumcarro; he’s just like a mad bull raging to be in the front of everything. Auld Earl Douglas, our great forbear, was naething to him for pride. He will just shame us all before the Duke and Duchess and their grand visitors, if some one will not interfere.”