For her nephew was “auld Charlie” to Miss Jean as well as to the youngest scoffer who called him by that name. The old maiden was contemptuous of the old bachelor. His age was an object of greater scorn to her than it was to the young men who on the whole liked “auld Charlie.” “A poor creature, a poor feeble old creature, with no character to speak of,” she said of him. She scorned him for being what he was, nobody’s husband, nobody’s father, and amid the openings of her old dream, while still she seemed to herself to be straying down the vast nave traced out by its old pillars, with her hand upon some one’s arm, who was dead and gone years ago--there recurred to her, now and then, a sarcastic criticism upon the old man who was so much younger than herself. She herself was two persons in one, difficult to identify in their separate characters: young Jean Hay-Heriot among the ruins, fresh and sweet as the youngest rose in the garden: old Miss Jean with her shrivelled face surrounded by her “borders,” her wrinkled hand leaning on her cane. But as for Mr. Charles he had never been but one, the same figure throughout, always lean, long, dried up, occupied about nick-nacks, buried in old books, unbending to nothing but golf. “And now he’s meddling with Marjory,” Miss Jean said to herself with a vindictive gleam of her black eye, “him that knows no more about it than a man of wood! But I’ll see to that, I’ll see to that;” and then the sweep of the great west window caught her eye, and she was young Jean again, looking up at it to hide her confused sweet girlish face from some one who would gaze too closely. Which was the real one between these two? which the most true, the past that lives for ever, or the present that is but for a moment? The old woman sat absorbed in this bewilderment of mingled memory and observation, and did not think the dim hours long as they stole past her. She would not have the lamp brought in till late. She sat at the window as Marjory had done, her old head framed in by the delicate crown of the broken arch, perfect on one side, an exquisite flowing shaft of ancient stone, with canopy work fit for a queen of heaven--on the other nothing but gloomy sky and sea. The darkness closed over her but Miss Jean noted it not. The scene before her eyes had brought all her life back to her; in that very room she had danced a girl. What need had she of lights, of books, something to divert her? as the sympathetic maid suggested who found the old lady in the dark and was sorry for her. “Go away, and bring me the lamp in an hour. I like the gloaming,” said Miss Jean in a softened tone.