ams?"

"My name is Williams, certainly; and you"--something in the curly light
hair, the mischievous twinkle of the eye, struck her--"you can not be,
it is scarcely possible--David Dalziel?"

"But, I am, though," cried the lad, shaking her hand as if he would shake
it off. "And I call myself very clever to have remembered you, though I
was such a little fellow when you left us, and I have only seen your
photograph since. But you are not a bit altered--not one bit. And as I
knew by your last letter to Archy that you were at Brighton, I thought
I'd risk it and speak. Hurra! How very jolly!"

He had grown a handsome lad, the pretty wee Davie, an honest-looking lad
too, apparently, and she was glad to see him. From the dignity of his
eighteen years and five feet ten of height, he looked down upon the
governess, and patronized her quite tenderly--dismissing his friend and
walking home with her, telling her on the way all his affairs and that of
his family with the volubility of little David Dalziel at St. Andrews.

"No, I've not forgotten St. Andrews one bit, though I was so small. I
remember poor old grannie, and her cottage, and the garden, and the
Links, and the golfing, and Mr. Roy. By-the-by, what has become of Mr.
Roy?"

The suddenness of the question, nay, the very sound of a name totally
silent for so many years, made Fortune's heart throb till its beating
was actual pain. Then came a sudden desperate hope, as she answered:

"I can not tell. I have never heard any thing of him. Have you?"

"No--yet, let me see. I think Archy once got a letter from him, a year
or so after he went away; but we lost it somehow, and never answered it.
We have never heard any thing since."

Miss Williams sat down on one of the benches facing the sea, with a
murmured excuse of being "tired." One of her little girls crept beside
her, stealing a hand in hers. She held it fast, her own shook so; but
gradually she grew quite herself again. "I have been ill," she
explained, "and can not walk far. Let us sit down here a little. You
were speaking about Mr. Roy, David?"

"Yes. What a good fellow he was! We called him Rob Roy, I remember, but
only behind his back. He was strict, but he was a jolly old soul for all
that. I believe I should know him again any day, as I did you. But
perhaps he is dead; people die pretty fast abroad, and ten years is a
long time, isn't it?"

"A long time. And you never got any more lett