But when old George Bethune resumed his monologue, it was neither Highland clans nor Lowland songs that concerned him; it was something that proved to be a good deal more interesting to his patient listener. It was of Maisrie’s youth that he spoke, and that in a far more simple and natural way than was his wont. There were no genealogical vauntings, no exalted visions of what she should be when she came in for her rights; there were reminiscences of her earlier years, and of his and her wanderings together; and there was throughout a certain wistfulness in his tone. For once he talked without striving for effect, without trying oratorically to convince himself; and it is to be imagined how entirely Vincent was engrossed by this simple recital. Not that there was any consecutive narrative. The young man could only vaguely gather that Maisrie’s father had been a railway-engineer; that he had married a young Scotch lady in Baltimore before going out west; that Maisrie had been born in Omaha; that shortly thereafter her mother died; then came the collapse of certain speculations her father had been led into, so that the widower, broken in heart and fortune, soon followed his young wife, leaving their child to the care of her only surviving relative. Whether there were some remains of the shattered fortune, or whether friends subscribed to make up a small fund for them, it appeared that the old man and his granddaughter were not quite penniless; for he took credit to himself that he had spent nearly all their little income, arising from this unspecified source, on Maisrie’s education. "I wish to have her fitted for any sphere to which she might be called," he went on, in a musing kind of way. "And I hope I have succeeded. She has had the best masters I could afford; and something of her teaching I have taken upon myself. But, after all, that is not of the greatest importance. She has seen the world—far more than most of her years; and she has not been spoiled by the contact. I could have wished her, perhaps, to have had more of the companionship of her own sex; but that was not often practicable, in our wandering life. However, she has an intuitive sympathy that stands for much; and if in society—which is not much in our way—she might show herself shy and reserved, well, I, for one, should not complain: that seems to me more to be coveted than confidence and self-assertion. As for outward manner she has never wanted any school-mistress other than her own natural tact and her own refinement of feeling; she is a gentlewoman at heart; rudeness, coarseness, presumption would be impossible to her—" "The merest stranger can see that," Vincent ventured to say, in rather a low voice.