Two days after Jane Smith’s exit and Clementina’s in-coming, Tom Black arrived. Miss Latimer and Lucy welcomed his cheery presence. Clementina certainly seemed highly respectable, and set about her work as one who wished to do her duty conscientiously. But her very presence was depressing. Her necessary sentences always ended with a sigh, and the depth of her mourning-raiment was never alleviated while she went about her household tasks. Indeed, one could scarcely fancy her in a cheerful lilac print. Of course, she had not worn caps on her father’s croft, and Lucy did not dream of suggesting them to her, though she could not help feeling that it would have been a joyful relief to see a white lace butterfly crowning the smooth black hair which seemed as much in mourning as all the rest of Clementina. The only little personalities which Clementina contributed to the kitchen furniture were three memorial cards: one yellow and almost undecipherable with age, the other in commemoration of the piper, Niel Gillespie, the friend of Rachel’s dead lover; the newest, a tribute to the recently deceased father; also she possessed a piece of quaint and heavy pottery, the figures of two children kneeling beside a grave under a weeping willow, and a dim old print, “The Death of Abel,” in a thick black frame. Tom brought quite a different order of things into the house. The pictures he hung up in his bedroom were of Skye terriers hopelessly watching butterflies, kittens playing with a ball, a group of cricketers on the green of his native place. He had his mother’s portrait, too, set up in a dainty little frame, on which he had evidently lavished some pocket-money. He brought it into the dining-room to show Lucy, and Lucy, with one moment’s reflection, asked him whether he would not like to keep it there, where he would pass his waking hours. “Oh, yes, certainly, Tom would like it, only wouldn’t Mrs. Challoner feel——” but while he was yet speaking, Lucy had taken it from his hand, and had found room for it on the mantelshelf. Her own father’s portrait and Charlie’s were there already. There had been one of herself and little Hugh, but her husband had taken that away with him. Lucy slipped Mrs. Black’s picture into the empty place. Clementina crooned eerie Gaelic songs in the kitchen. Tom went about the house singing— “For a-hunting we will go!” It is, perhaps, needless to say in which song Hugh learned to join. Indeed, the oddest thing about Clementina was that Hugh did not seem to like her—no, not though she always sent up a special little pie-cake for him whenever there was a pie, and though if her face ever wore a smile, that smile was put on for him. Alas, little Hugh had been so fond of the ill-starred Jessie Morison! It seemed a pity that such proven moral instability should have charms which this manifold respectability had not!