"I am sorry for that, Walter, since it seems a place you must have a great deal to do with. Auchnasheen, then, was that better? You must teach me to pronounce the name." "Auchnasheen, if possible, was worse," he said. "I shall never be able to endure either the one or the other, or forget the associations--don't make me think of them, please. When I got home I thought I should be able to escape all that." "My dear, I beg your pardon: I did not know. Was the weather then so bad? They say it always rains--and the place very dull, of course, so far in the wilds? But you said in your letter that the lake was lovely, and that there were some pleasant people----" He put up his hand, begging her to go no further. "It was lovely enough if you like, but I hate the place; isn't that enough? I shall never go back with my free will." Mrs. Methven looked at him in astonishment. "I thought--" she said, "you remember how fantastic you thought it, and mediæval--that you had to make a periodical visit to the old home of the race?" His very lips trembled with irritation. He had written about all that in the first days of his absence, and even after his arrival at Loch Houran, making fun of the old world stipulation. She might have divined, he thought, that it was a very different matter now. "I am sorry to keep you so long here, out of your own comfortable corner," he said. "You never like sitting in the dining-room. It is brutal of me to keep you here." "No, Walter, it is my pleasure," she cried; then, poor soul, with that most uncalled-for, unprofitable desire for information, "And there are so many things I want to know----" He commanded himself with a great effort. "Mother," he said, "I have not enjoyed my visit to Scotland. There are a great many things that perhaps I may be able to talk of hereafter if you will give me time, but that I don't want even to think of now. And I'm tired with my journey; and everything is not _couleur de rose_, as you seem to think. Let me alone, if you can, for to-night." "Let you alone--if I can!" She was so startled, so bitterly disappointed, that for a moment or two she could not speak. And this aggravated Walter still more. "Mother," he cried, getting up from his unsatisfactory meal, "I hope you are not going to make a scene the first night."