We had only a little while of this, however, for on the morrow Louis was to arrive from school, safely escorted by Freddy Esquillant and half-a-dozen students, who had made a jovial party all the way from Edinburgh. Now I may write myself down a selfish brute by the confession I am going to make. But all the same, the thing is true and had better be owned up to, all the more in the light of what afterwards happened. I had no great wish that Louis should join our little party, which with the advent of little Master Red Knuckles, had been rendered quite complete. It was, I admit, an unworthy jealousy. But I thought that as Irma had always been so passionately devoted to Louis--and also because she had, as I sometimes teased myself by imagining, only come to me because she had lost Louis--his coming back would--_might_, I had the grace to say on second thoughts, deprive me of some part of my hard-earned heritage--the love of the woman who was all to me. For with me, his unworthy father, even Duncan Maitland had not yet begun to count. With a man that comes later. This is my confession, and once made, let us pass on. I had even then the grace to be ashamed--at least, rather. Louis arrived. He had grown into a tall lad with long hair of straw-coloured gold, that shone with irregular reflections like muffled moonlight on a still but gently rippling sea. He was quieter, and seemed somehow different. He was now all for his books and solitude, and sat long in the room that had been given him for a bedroom and study--that with the window looking out on the wood. It was the quietest in the house--not only because of our youthful bull of Bashan and his roaring, but because it was at the farthest end of the long rambling house, away from the stables and cattle sheds. However, he seemed delighted to see Irma, and sat a long time with her hand in his. But I, who knew her well, noticed that there was not now on her face the old strained attention to all that her brother said or did. It was in another direction that her ears and thoughts were turned, and at the first cry from baby's cot she rose quietly, disengaging her hand without remark before disappearing into the bedroom-nursery. In another moment I could see my grandmother pass the window drying her hands on her apron. I knew from the ceasing of the plunging thud of the dasher that she had called a substitute to the churning. The dasher was now in the hands of Aunt Jen, who handled it with a shorter, more irrascible stroke.