should be so, and that they should be ready to begin their work as if not a day had passed. Unchanged in a world of change! But the guest himself would be more changed than his surroundings; for he could only have been a boy--not much older than she herself--when he was last at Gleneira. The thought lingered, and after her task was over she wandered from room to room trying to put herself in his place, and guess how it would strike him. For it was pleasant sometimes, when one had an hour to spare, to spend it in that fanciful world of feeling, with which her practical life had so little to do. His mother's sitting-room! That could not fail to be sad, even though the fair-haired original of the faded portrait in pastels over the mantelpiece had passed from life when he was still a child. Yet, if _she_ by any chance could see even the smallest thing that had once belonged to that mother whose memory was a mere abstraction, who had never really existed for her at all, she would feel sad, and so he must also who had known his. Well, Captain Macleod's mother must have been dreadfully fond of fancy work, to judge by the room! And yet, not so long ago, she herself had been full of childish admiration for that terrible screen in the corner, which now only excited a wild wonder how any responsible human being could have wasted hours--nay! days, months--in producing such a fearful result. It represented a Highlander in full national costume, done in cross-stitch; the flesh was worked in small pink beads, giving a horrible pimply appearance to the face and a stony glare to the eyes; in the distance rose purple silk hills, and the foreground consisted of an over-grown velvet pile mongrel with a tail in feather stitch. In those childish days of admiration, however, it had had a fearful charm of its own, born of its inaccessibility. For, once within a certain radius, the whole picture disappeared into a senseless medley of silk, worsted, and beads. Only distance lent design, making four white beads and a black one a recognisable equivalent for the human eye. As she stood looking at it now, an amused smile curved her lips, with the remembrance that in still more childish days she had mixed up this magnificent Highlander with her conceptions of the absent laird. Probably it was quite as like him now as the crayon drawing, labelled "Paul," of a pallid boy holding a toy ship, which hung on the wall beside the pastel. On the other side was another pallid boy holding another ship, and labelled "Alick." As far as she could judge Alick might have grown up to be Paul, and Paul to be Alick. Only Paul held his ship in his right hand, and Alick in his left; but that was, of course, only because their portraits had to look at each other across the picture of their mother; because, as it were, of the exigencies of Art. She smiled to herself as she drifted on lazily to what Mrs. Cameron had considered the keystone of the laird's position. It was a dim,