While her father and uncle were thus fuming over her absence, Marjory Hay-Heriot, with her little sister, had been making her way quietly about the little town of Comlie, whither they had ridden down in the morning, tempted by the sunshine, after some days of rainy weather. Comlie was a little old clean and quaint place, an old-fashioned Fife borough, devoted to fishing in its lower parts, but possessing such a High Street as not one of all its sister-towns possessed. This High Street had a wide causeway, clean and straight, and a broad footpath into which many old-fashioned large houses stepped forward with their white gables, in a true picturesque old Scotch way, telling of better times and characteristics more decided than our own. A quaint little semi-metropolitan air was about this silent street, through which the broad sunshine fell with few shadows to obstruct it. A little town-hall with a quaint ancient steeple stood in the middle of the street, with one square unglazed window protected by iron rails, the window of the town Bridewell, raised just above the heads of the passers-by, and looking as like the little town prison of an Italian mountain village as two similar things could look in places so unlike. At the west end was an old inn, a little hostel which, no doubt, was doing a good trade in the days when queens and courts were at Falkland Palace, and archbishops reigned in St. Andrews. The houses on the south side of the street with their projecting gables, whitewashed and many-windowed, looked out upon the sea to the back, over the fringe of fisher cottages which lay lower, close to the beach. At the east end of the town stood the church, an old church cobbled into mediocrity, but still displaying to instructed eyes the lines of its original structure, and tempting archæologists with hopes of restoration. It was surrounded by a churchyard full of monuments of the sixteenth century, with skulls and cross-bones and urns and puffing cherubs. It is astonishing how many dead people belonging to that century could afford to leave behind them those cumbrous masses of stone. The Manse, a solid, and in its way, spacious square stone house, stood at a little distance overlooking the sea; and outside the church gates, where the broad street had widened into a kind of triangular _place_, there were several “genteel” houses--one decorated with iron gates and trees in front, but the rest old, of characteristic Fife architecture, each with its white gable. The sea is the background to everything in this country, and to-day it was blue, a keen and chill, but brilliant tone of colour, throwing up the whitewashed houses and light grey stone with a brightness almost worthy of Italy; though no Italian wind, unless, indeed, a Tramontana fresh from the snowy hills, ever penetrated human bones like that steady blast from the east, which came natural to the people of Comlie.