so painful to hear his dear, trembling voice,--and it was "The
Bonnie Lass o' Ballochmyle." If it is not very far, will you take me
one day, when you have time, Uncle Abel, to see Mauchline and Mossgiel
and Ballochmyle?'

She looked at him fearlessly as she made her request, and her courage
pleased him.

'We'll see. Perhaps at the Fair, when fares are cheap. But it will only
be to please you; I never want to see the place again.'

'Oh, is not that very strange, Uncle Abel, that papa and you should
think of it so differently? He loved it all so much, and he always said,
when we were rich, we should come, he and I together, to Scotland.'

'He was glad enough to turn his back on it, anyhow. If he had stayed in
Glasgow, and attended to business, he might have been a rich man,' said
he incautiously.

'_You_ are not rich, though you have done so,' said Gladys quickly,
looking at him with her young, fearless eyes. 'I think papa was better
off than you, because he could always be in the country, and not here.'

The undisguised contempt on the girl's face as she took in her
surroundings rather nettled the old man, and he gave her a snappish
answer, then picked himself up, and went off to his warehouse.

Next day Gladys had to rise quite early--before six--and with her own
hands light the fire, under the old man's superintendence, thus
receiving her first lesson in the economy of firelighting. She was very
patient, and learned her lesson very well. While she was brushing in the
hearth she heard another foot on the passage, and was further astonished
by the tones of a woman's voice giving utterance to surprise.

'Mercy on us! wha's he gotten noo?'

The words, uttered in the broadest Scotch, and further graced by the
unlovely Glasgow accent, fell on the girl's ears like the sound of a
foreign tongue. She paused, broom in hand, and looked in rather a
bewildered manner at the short stout figure standing in the doorway,
with bare red arms akimbo, and the broadest grin on her coarse but not
unkindly face.

'I beg your pardon, what is it?' Gladys asked kindly, and the surprise
deepened on the Scotchwoman's face.

'Ye'll be his niece, mebbe--his brither's lass, are ye, eh? And hae ye
come to bide? If ye hiv, Almichty help ye!'

Gladys shook her head, not understanding yet a single word. At this
awkward juncture the old man came hurrying along the passage, and Mrs.
Macintyre turned to him with a little curtsey.

'I'm speak