"If you've got to help some private individual, Mr. Merriman, I'd rather you didn't make it me; I'd rather you made it old man Callender. If he goes under now he'll never get to the top again." "Not Samuel B. Callender?" said Merriman, with a note of surprise and very real interest in his voice. "Is he in trouble? I didn't know. Why, that will never do--a fine old fighting character like that--and besides ... why, wouldn't you have thought that he would have come to me himself or that at least he would have confided in my son Jim?" Brett winced. Merriman wrote something upon a card and handed it to Brett. "Can you see that he gets that?" he asked. "Yes, sir," said Brett. "Tell him, then, to present it at my office the first thing in the morning. It will get him straight to me. I can't stand idle and see the father of the girl my boy is going to marry ruined." "I didn't know--" said Brett. He was very white, and his lips trembled in spite of his best efforts to control them. "I congratulate you, sir. She is very lovely," he added. Mr. Merriman regarded the miserable young man quizzically. "But," he said, "Mr. Callender has three daughters." "Oh, no," said Brett dismally, "there is only the one." "My boy," said Mr. Merriman, "I am afraid that you are an incorrigible plunger--at stocks, at romance, and at conclusions. I don't know if I am going to comfort you or give you pain, but the girl my son is going to marry is _Mary_ Callender." The color returned to Brett's cheek and the sparkle to his eyes. He grasped Mr. Merriman by both hands, and in a confidential voice he said: "Mr. Merriman, there is no such person." THE McTAVISH I By the look of her she might have been a queen, or a princess, or at the very least a duchess. But she was no one of these. She was only a commoner--a plain miss, though very far from plain. Which is extraordinary when you consider that the blood of the Bruce flowed with exceeding liveliness in her veins, together with the blood of many another valiant Scot--Randolph, Douglas, Campbell--who bled with Bruce or for him. With the fact that she was not at the very least a duchess, _most_ of her temporal troubles came to an abrupt end. When she tired of her castle at Beem-Tay she could hop into her motor-car and fly down the Great North Road to her castle at Brig O'Dread. This was a fifty-mile run, and from any part of the road she could see land that belonged to her--forest, farm, and moor. If the air at Beem-Tay was too formal, or the keep at Brig O'Dread too gloomy, she could put up at any of her half-dozen shooting lodges, built in wild, inaccessible, wild-fowly places, and shake the dust of the world from her feet, and tread, just under heaven, upon the heather.