"In regard to the present musician," replied Paul, beginning to dismount, "I am sure no such scheme of self-sacrifice ever entered her head. Miss Carmichael is charming, I admit; but she has a mission in life, and it is not to regulate me. That, I think, is a fair and full statement of the truth, except that before I came here she used to practise occasionally on the piano at the Big House, and, I presume, left her music there by mistake." Mrs. Vane stopped in an attitude of tragic despair. "There! I have gone and forgotten it after all, and that was my excuse for going so soon. You see, your sister said it had better be taken back at once, as none of the girls in the house played, and so it wouldn't be wanted." Paul bit his lip at the double thrust. "Perhaps it is as well you _have_ forgotten it," he said angrily; "Miss Carmichael will, no doubt, be able to use it herself some day soon." "That will be delightful," replied Mrs. Vane, with a sudden cessation of attack. Five minutes after, rather to his own surprise, Paul Macleod found himself talking to Marjory as he might have talked to any other girl of his acquaintance, and wondering how he could have been such a fool as to imagine himself to be in love with her. After all, he told himself, his first theory had been right, and the ridiculously unconventional familiarity of the past idyll was mainly responsible for the mawkish sentimentality which had attacked him of late, but which, thank heaven! was now over. How could it be otherwise with a girl like Marjory--a perfect iceberg of primness and propriety? His sense of security, joined to a certain unconfessed resentment at her apparent indifference as to whether he came or not, drove him into more effusive apologies on his sister's behalf than he would otherwise have made, and brought down on him a remark from Mrs. Cameron that "Indeed and in truth Marjory would no be going to make strangers of the laird and his sister, and he so kind, in and out o' the house for weeks, just like a bairn of her own." Whereat Mrs. Vane, stifling a desire to laugh at Paul's evident confusion, came to the rescue with a well-timed diversion about some of the household troubles which had been occupying Lady George. '"Deed!" said Mrs. Cameron, after listening sympathetically, "I can well believe it! But the warld will come to an end soon, that's one comfort. You see, it'll just no be possible' for Providence to put up wi' it much longer, for it's a' I can do to have patience wi' my small corner of the vineyard, an' that, praise be, is no sae bad as it might be, seeing that I can hand my ain wi' most folk." "But Providence can do that also, surely, Mrs. Cameron?" laughed Paul.