er persons
with the same sort of fairness, I thought it was a purity of complexion
special to some, but not to all. I was not fair like that, and neither
was any one else I knew.

CHAPTER III

It was when I was ten years old that Wee Elspeth ceased coming to me,
and though I missed her at first, it was not with a sense of grief or
final loss. She had only gone somewhere.

It was then that Angus Macayre began to be my tutor. He had been a
profound student and had lived among books all his life. He had helped
Jean in her training of me, and I had learned more than is usually
taught to children in their early years. When a grand governess was
sent to Muircarrie by my guardian, she was amazed at the things I
was familiar with, but she abhorred the dark, frowning castle and the
loneliness of the place and would not stay. In fact, no governess would
stay, and so Angus became my tutor and taught me old Gaelic and Latin
and Greek, and we read together and studied the ancient books in the
library. It was a strange education for a girl, and no doubt made me
more than ever unlike others. But my life was the life I loved.

When my guardian decided that I must live with him in London and be
educated as modern girls were, I tried to be obedient and went to him;
but before two months had passed my wretchedness had made me so ill that
the doctor said I should go into a decline and die if I were not sent
back to Muircarrie.

"It's not only the London air that seems to poison her," he said when
Jean talked to him about me; "it is something else. She will not live,
that's all. Sir Ian must send her home."

As I have said before, I had been an unattractive child and I was a
plain, uninteresting sort of girl. I was shy and could not talk to
people, so of course I bored them. I knew I did not look well when I
wore beautiful clothes. I was little and unimportant and like a reed for
thinness. Because I was rich and a sort of chieftainess I ought to have
been tall and rather stately, or at least I ought to have had a bearing
which would have made it impossible for people to quite overlook me.
But; any one could overlook me--an insignificant, thin girl who slipped
in and out of places and sat and stared and listened to other people
instead of saying things herself; I liked to look on and be forgotten.
It interested me to watch people if they did not notice me.

Of course, my relatives did not really like me. How could they? They
wer