ere was no sight in Wythburn more touching than to see this girl
solacing her father's declining years, meeting his wishes with
anticipatory devices, pampering him in his whims, soothing him in the
imaginary sorrows sometimes incident to age, even indulging him with a
sort of pathetic humor in his frequent hallucinations. To do this she
had to put by a good many felicities dear to her age and condition,
but there was no apparent consciousness of self-sacrifice. She had
many lovers, for in these early years she was beautiful; and she had
yet more suitors, for she was accounted rich. But neither flattery nor
the fervor of genuine passion seemed to touch her, and those who
sought her under the transparent guise of seeking her father usually
went away as they came. She had a smile and the cheeriest word of
welcome for all alike, and so the young dalesmen who wooed her from
the ignoble motive came to think her a little of a coquette, while
those who wooed her from the purer impulse despaired of ruffling with
the gentlest gales of love the still atmosphere of her heart.

One day suddenly, however, the old statesman died, and his fiddle was
heard no more across the valley in the quiet of the evening, but was
left untouched for the dust to gather on it where he himself had hung
it on the nail in the kitchen under his hat. Then when life seemed to
the forlorn girl a wide blank, a world without a sun in it, Angus Ray
went over for the first time as a suitor to the cottage under
Castenand, and put his hand in hers and looked calmly into her eyes.
He told her that a girl could not live long an unfriended life like
hers--that she should not if she could; she could not if she
would--would she not come to him?

It was the force of the magnet to the steel. With swimming eyes she
looked up into his strong face, tender now with a tremor never before
seen there; and as he drew her gently towards him her glistening tears
fell hot and fast over her brightening and now radiant face, and, as
though to hide them from him, she laid her head on his breast. This
was all the wooing of Angus Ray.

They had two sons, and of these the younger more nearly resembled his
mother. Willy Ray had not merely his mother's features; he had her
disposition also. He had the rounded neck and lissom limbs of a woman;
he had a woman's complexion, and the light of a woman's look in his
soft blue eyes. When the years gave a thin curly beard to his cheek
they took