“Aunt Jean will be waiting for us,” she cried, with a compunction which was quickened by the well-known tradition of punctuality which distinguished the Hay-Heriots. “Well, well, my dear, it will do her no harm for once,” said Mrs. Murray, going to the door with the visitors, and opening it for them with her own hands. She came out to the step to see them on their way, while her husband stood behind. “Be sure you don’t sit too long with Miss Jean--for there’s a storm coming up, as the doctor says; and come soon back again,” said the old lady, smiling and waving her hand, while her cap-strings wantoned in front of her in the rising wind. “That lassie has strange notions,” she said, as she came in and shut the door. “I wish I saw her with a good man and bairns of her own.” “She’s a fine girl,” said the doctor, turning along the passage to his dressing-room, to wash his hands before dinner. These words did not at all resemble in sense the other expression of applause, “a fine woman”--which they resemble in sound. Dr. Murray did not mean to imply that he found May “fine” in physical development--_belle femme_, as the French say, with a similar signification. He meant that she was delightful, charming, the best specimen he knew of everything a young woman should be. We are obliged to confess, however, that it was with a somewhat undignified precipitation that the two sisters crossed the wide street to the dwelling-place of their old aunt. Miss Jean Hay-Heriot was grand-aunt to the younger generation. Her father, the Laird of Pitcomlie, was grandfather of the present Laird: but as she had been the youngest of her family, she was scarcely ten years older than her nephew. She had lived in this gabled house for five and forty years, since the time when, still a young woman, she had given up the world in disgust, after five or six years of wandering in places where lone ladies resort to--Bath, and Cheltenham, and Harrowgate--for in those days it had not become the custom to go abroad. Five and forty years! What a waste of time to look back upon, and what a monotonous, unfeatured expanse, May thought, who sometimes pondered over her old aunt’s fate as one chapter among many of the phenomena of feminine existence. But to Miss Jean this waste of years was not so unfeatured as to her young relative. There seemed no reason why she should not go on for ever in the same active yet tranquil way. From her window in the gable she superintended all that Comlie did, every stranger who came into it (they were not many), all the mild visiting that took place among the higher classes, and the family movements of the lower, quarrels, flirtations, marriages, catastrophes of all kinds. She was seated in this same window, when Marjory, a little flushed with haste, hurriedly gathering up her riding-habit, and finding it much in the way, became visible running over from the Manse, Milly close behind, with her long hair streaming.