tried that more than once."

"Then, Alick, there is nothing for it but to let it take its course;
and even upon your own view, your sister will be much safer married than
single."

"I had very little expectation of your saying anything else, but in
common honesty I felt bound to let you know."

"And now the best thing to be done is to forget all you have said."

"Which you will do the more easily as you think it an amiable delusion
of mine. Well, so much the better. I dare say you will never think
otherwise, and I would willingly believe that my senses went after my
fingers' ends."

The Colonel almost believed so himself. He was aware of the miserably
sensitive condition of shattered nerve in which Alick had been sent
home, and of the depression of spirits that had ensued on the news of
his father's death; and he thought it extremely probable that his weary
hours and solicitude for his gay young sister might have made molehills
into mountains, and that these now weighed on his memory and conscience.
At least, this seemed the only way of accounting for an impression so
contrary to that which Bessie Keith made on every one else, and, by
his own avowal, on the uncle whom he so much revered. Every other voice
proclaimed her winning, amiable, obliging, considerate, and devoted
to the service of her friends, with much drollery and shrewdness of
perception, tempered by kindness of heart and unwillingness to give
pain; and on that sore point of residence with the blind uncle, it
was quite possibly a bit of Alick's exaggerated feeling to imagine the
arrangement so desirable--the young lady might be the better judge.

On the whole, the expostulation left Colonel Keith more uncomfortable on
Alick's account than on that of his brother.

CHAPTER XVI. AN APPARITION.

"And there will be auld Geordie Tanner,
Who coft a young wife wi' his gowd."
JOANNA BAILLIE.

"Mamma," quoth Leoline, "I thought a woman must not marry her
grandfather. And she called him the patriarch of her clan."

"He is a cross old man," added Hubert. "He said children ought not to be
allowed on the esplanade, because he got into the way as I was pushing
the perambulator."

"This was the reason," said Francis, gravely, "that she stopped me
from braying at him. I shall know what people are at, when they talk of
disrespect another time."

"Don't talk of her," cried Conrade, flinging himself round; "women have
no