it? You want us for your tenants, eh, Davie?"

"Just that. You've hit it. Couldn't wish better. In fact, I have
already written to my trustees to drive the hardest bargain possible."

Which was an ingenious modification of the truth, as she afterward found;
but evidently the lad had set his heart upon the thing. And she?

At first she shrank back from the plan with a shiver almost of fear. It
was like having to meet face to face something--some one--long dead. To
walk among the old familiar places, to see the old familiar sea and
shore, nay, to live in the very same house, haunted, as houses are
sometimes, every room and every nook, with ghosts--yet with such innocent
ghosts--Could she bear it?

There are some people who have an actual terror of the past--who the
moment a thing ceases to be pleasurable fly from it, would willingly bury
it out of sight forever. But others have no fear of their harmless
dead--dead hopes, memories, loves--can sit by a grave-side, or look
behind them at a dim spectral shape, without grief, without dread, only
with tenderness. This woman could.

After a long wakeful night, spent in very serious thought for every one's
good, not excluding her own--since there is a certain point beyond which
one has no right to forget one's self, and perpetual martyrs rarely make
very pleasant heads of families--she said to her girls next morning that
she thought David Dalziel's brilliant idea had a great deal of sense in
it; St. Andrews was a very nice place, and the cottage there would
exactly suit their finances, while the tenure upon which he proposed they
should hold it (from term to term) would also fit in with their undecided
future; because, as all knew, wherever Helen or Janetta married, each
would take her fortune and go, leaving Miss Williams with her little
legacy, above want certainly, but not exactly a millionaire.

These and other points she set before them in her practical fashion, just
as if her heart did not leap--sometimes with pleasure, sometimes with
pain--at the very thought of St. Andrews, and as if to see herself sit
daily and hourly face to face with her old self, the ghost of her own
youth, would be a quite easy thing.

The girls were delighted. They left all to Auntie, as was their habit to
do. Burdens naturally fall upon the shoulders fitted for them, and which
seem even to have a faculty for drawing them down there. Miss Williams's
new duties had developed in her