e busy in their big world and did not know what to do with a girl who
ought to have been important and was not. I am sure that in secret they
were relieved when I was sent back to Muircarrie.

After that the life I loved went on quietly. I studied with Angus, and
made the book-walled library my own room. I walked and rode on the moor,
and I knew the people who lived in the cottages and farms on the estate.
I think they liked me, but I am not sure, because I was too shy to seem
very friendly. I was more at home with Feargus, the piper, and with
some of the gardeners than I was with any one else. I think I was lonely
without knowing; but I was never unhappy. Jean and Angus were my nearest
and dearest. Jean was of good blood and a stanch gentlewoman, quite
sufficiently educated to be my companion as she had been my early
governess.

It was Jean who told Angus that I was giving myself too entirely to the
study of ancient books and the history of centuries gone by.

"She is living to-day, and she must not pass through this life without
gathering anything from it."

"This life," she put it, as if I had passed through others before, and
might pass through others again. That was always her way of speaking,
and she seemed quite unconscious of any unusualness in it.

"You are a wise woman, Jean," Angus said, looking long at her grave
face. "A wise woman."

He wrote to the London book-shops for the best modern books, and I began
to read them. I felt at first as if they plunged me into a world I did
not understand, and many of them I could not endure. But I persevered,
and studied them as I had studied the old ones, and in time I began to
feel as if perhaps they were true. My chief weariness with them came
from the way they had of referring to the things I was so intimate with
as though they were only the unauthenticated history of a life so
long passed by that it could no longer matter to any one. So often the
greatest hours of great lives were treated as possible legends. I
knew why men had died or were killed or had borne black horror. I knew
because I had read old books and manuscripts and had heard the stories
which had come down through centuries by word of mouth, passed from
father to son.

But there was one man who did not write as if he believed the world had
begun and would end with him. He knew he was only one, and part of
all the rest. The name I shall give him is Hector MacNairn. He was a
Scotchman, but he had