In the drawing-room he found his sister and the widow. "Hullo!" said the W.S. before he could recollect himself. "Hullo!" smiled the widow archly. He had felt ashamed of the exclamation the moment it escaped him, but finding it received so prettily, he secretly resolved to say it again some day--after a week or two had elapsed, perhaps; confining himself to more dignified remarks in the interval. "You look as though you had heard good news," said Mrs. Dunbar. "I've been chasing my hat," he chuckled. He had meant to make no allusion to the undignified episode, and here he was blurting it out first thing! He began to feel puzzled by this odd persistence of high spirits. "Not in the street, surely?" said Miss Walkingshaw, with her longest face. "Oh, I hope it was in the street!" cried the widow. "I'd have loved to see you!" Her dear friend regarded this speech with the strongest disapproval; in fact, she had never quite approved of Madge since those unlucky words of hers. But Mrs. Dunbar had ceased for some reason to show the same marked regard for her opinion. It was Heriot who had again refused to hear of her leaving, and she seemed content to win his approval. "It was in the street," smiled Mr. Walkingshaw. "I chased it for quite half a mile, and ran it down single-handed. I wish you had been there, Madge. You'd have seen there was life in the old dog still!" He had doubled the distance and forgotten the lady with the umbrella; but then, as Andrew had remarked, a distaste for dry detail had suddenly become characteristic of his recovered health. "Too much life sometimes, I think!" she exclaimed coquettishly; and Mr. Walkingshaw winked in reply. He was inwardly as surprised at the wink as he had been at the "hullo." These aberrations seemed to come quite spontaneously. He wished he could understand what caused them. "Have you had a tiring day at the office?" asked the dry Scotch voice of his sister. Her familiar accents instinctively banished the aberrations. "Tolerably, tolerably," he said, with his old air. "We had the affairs of Guthrie and Co. to settle up. I settled them, though." "Andrew would be a great help," she replied, with an apprehensive glance at him. She was much in her nephew's confidence at present. "Andrew, pooh!" said his father. "He'd talk the hind leg off an elephant. When things need settling, I just settle them myself and leave him to grumble away to Thomieson." Miss Walkingshaw gasped, and the widow gave the sweetest little laugh. "Poor Andrew!" said she. "Poor Andrew indeed," retorted her friend, with more indignation than she had almost ever permitted herself in the presence of her formidable brother. He looked at her in genuine surprise. So subtly had his point of view altered that he quite failed to grasp her cause of complaint. "What's the matter, Mary?" he asked. "Oh, if you don't see, what's the good in my trying to explain?" He merely stared at her, and the widow tactfully interposed.