uld like to hear about your friends."

"Should you?--that is something new. If it had been always so--if you
had indeed made my interests yours, Sybilla!" There was a touch of
regret and old tenderness in his voice. She thought he was kind on
account of her illness, and thanked him warmly. But the thanks sent
him back to his usual cold self; he did not like to have his weakness
noticed.

Mrs. Rothesay understood neither one state of feeling nor the other, so
she said, cheerfully, "Come, now for the story of Alison Balfour."

"There is no story to tell. She was merely a young companion of my aunt
Flora. I knew her for some years--in fact, until she married Mr. Gwynne.
She was a noble woman."

"Really, Angus, I shall grow jealous," said Mrs. Rothesay, half in jest,
half in earnest. "She must have been an old love of yours."

Her husband frowned. "Folly, Sybilla! She was a woman, and I a
schoolboy!"

And yet the words galled him, for they were not far off the truth. True,
Alison was old enough to have been his mother; but many a precocious lad
of sixteen conceives a similar romantic passion, and Angus Rothesay had
really been very much in love, as he thought, with Alison Balfour.

Even when he quitted the room, and walked out into the road, his
thoughts went backward many years; picturing the old dull mansion, whose
only brightness had come with her presence. He remembered how he used to
walk by her side, in lonely mountain rambles--he a young boy, and she a
grown woman; and how proud he was, when she stooped her tall stature to
lean upon his arm. Once, she kissed him; and he lay awake all night, and
many a night after, dreaming of the remembered bliss. And, as he grew a
youth, what delicious sweetness in these continued dreams! what pride to
think himself "in love"--and with such a woman! Folly it was--hopeless
folly--for she had been long betrothed to one she loved. But that was
not Owen Gwynne. Alas! Alison, like many another proud, passionate
woman, had married in sudden anger, thereby wrecking her whole life!
When she did so, Angus Rothesay lost his boyish dream. He had already
begun to find out that it was only a dream; though his first fancy's
idol never ceased to be to him a memory full of all that was noble and
beautiful in womanhood.

For many years this enchanted portion of Captain Rothesay's past life
had rarely crossed his mind; but when it did, it was always with a
half-unconscious thought, that he h