desolate sense of the emptiness of the world and all things, which was in the mind of Elsie when her brother told her that he wanted no lassies there. Marion knew that if she went into her husband’s study when two or three of the brethren were gathered together, her entrance would probably stop a laugh, and her husband would look up and say, “Well, my dear?” interrogatively, with just the same meaning, though less roughly than that of Rodie. She had seen it in her mother’s case; she accepted it as quite natural in her anticipations of her own. This curious composure made her, perhaps, all the more interesting--certainly a more curious study--to Elsie, who had fire and flame in her veins incomprehensible to the elder sister. Elsie followed her about with that hot iron to facilitate the marking, and drank in her words with many a protest against them. Let it not be supposed that Marion marked her own “things” with the vulgarity of marking-ink; but she marked the dusters and the commoner kinds of napery, the coarser towels and sheets, all the inferior part of her plenishing in this common way, an operation which occupied a good many mornings, during which there went on much edifying talk. Sometimes, while they sat at one end of the large dining-table in the dining-room,--for it was not permitted to litter the drawing-room with this kind of work,--Mrs. Buchanan would be seated at the other, with her large basket of stockings to darn, or other domestic mendings, and, in that case, the talk was more varied, and went over a wider field. Naturally, the mother was not quite philosophic or so perfectly informed as was the young daughter on the verge of her life. “I hear,” said Mrs. Buchanan, “that old Mr. Anderson’s house in the High Street is getting all prepared and made ready for young Frank Mowbray and his mother. She is not a very wise woman, and very discontented. I fear that the old man left much less than was expected. When I think how good he was to us, and that Willie’s outfit and your plenishing are just, so to speak, gifts of his bounty, I feel as if we were a kind of guilty when I hear of his mother’s complaint. For, if he had not given us, and other people as well as much as he did, there would have been more for her, or at least for her Frank.” “But she had nothing to do with it, mother,” said Marion; “and he had a good right to please himself, seeing it was all his own.” “All that is quite true,” said Mrs. Buchanan; “I made use of the very same argument myself when your father was so cast down about it, and eager to pay it back, and James Morrison would not listen to him. I just said, ‘It’s in the very Scripture--Shall I not do what I like with my own?’ And then your father tells me that you must not always take the words of a parable for direct instruction, and that the man who said that was meaning--but if you ask him, he will tell you himself what we were to understand.”