“Oh, she will just bide on,” said Marion; “she has always expected it. She has her friends. There’s the church quite near, and she’ll go to all the prayer meetings. She aye says she has no time as long as we’re here, but that when we’re away, she will go to them, every one. But I think she’ll change her mind,” said the girl with a laugh, “and go out to her tea.” Archie had caught his father’s eye, and was much confused. “It’ll not be any the worse for her?” he said. Before the question could be answered, Mrs. Brown came in, a little flushed but beaming. “The dinner is just ready,” she said. “Bairns, did I not tell you to take up your papaw to the drawing-room till the cloth was laid. And you’ll be hungry, Jims, just off your journey.” She spoke as if she supposed him to have come straight from India without any chance of a meal upon the way. The dinner was a curious mixture of what was excellent and what was bad. The hotch-potch, for which Mrs. Brown apologised, was excellent. It is a soup made with lamb and all the fresh young vegetables, which, in the characteristic Scotch _cuisine_, supplies the place in summer of the admirable broth. Rowland had never tasted anything better; but it was followed by what Mrs. Brown called a “made dish,” which was as bad as the other was excellent, but of which the good woman was very proud. “You see my hand has no forgotten its cunning,” she said, with a smirk across the table; and Rowland then recollected with dismay that in the distant ages, almost beyond his own recollection, Jane, his wife’s elder sister, had exercised the craft of a cook. “Weel,” she said, after the meal, herself taking him upstairs to the glories of the drawing-room, “you’re satisfied? you would be ill to please if you were not, with these two bonnie bairns. And just as good as they are bonnie--Archie as steady as a rock, aye in to the minnint, though thae student lads are no that careful. Eh, Jims, what a pleasure it would have been to my poor sister to have seen them grown up like that.” This softened, even while it exasperated Rowland--for no doubt poor Mary’s imagination, like her sister’s, could have gone no further than the pert intelligence of Marion and the steadiness of her boy. “I should have liked better if they had been kept to some occupation,” he said, “not suffered to lead useless lives.”