e dashed on deck,
waiting no answer to that or to the friendly nod of parting to Gilian.

"Now isn't she a wonder?" asked the seaman, amused, astonished, proud.
"Did you ever hear singing like it?"

"I never did," said Gilian.

"Ah, she is almost as fine as a piper!" said the seaman. "She comes down
here every time I am at the quay and she will be singing here till the
timbers strain themselves to listen."

"I like her very much," said Gilian.

"Of course you do," the seaman cried, with a thump of his hard hand on
the edge of his bunk, "and would it not be very curious indeed if you
did not like her? I have heard women sing in many places--bold ones in
Amsterdam, and the shy dancers of Bermuda, but never her equal, and she
only a child. How she does it is the beat of me."

"I know," said Gilian, reddening a little to say so much to the seaman,
but emboldened by the shadows he sat among. "The birds sing that way
and the winds and the tide, because they have the feeling of it and they
must. And when she sings she is 'The Rover,' or she is 'The Man with the
Green Coat.'"

"Indeed, and it is very easy too when you explain," said the seaman,
whether in earnest or in fun the boy could not make out "She is the
strange one anyway, and they say General Turner, who's her father and
the man this ship belongs to, is not knowing very well what to make of
her. What is the matter with you?" For the boy's face was crimson as he
looked up the quay after the girl from the deck where now they stood.

"Oh," said Gilian, "I was just wondering if that would be the family the
Paymaster is not friendly with."

The seaman laughed. "That same!" said he. "And are you in the family
feud too? If that is so you'll hear little of Miss Nan's songs, I'm
thinking, and that is the folly of feuds. If I was you I would say
nothing about the _Jean_, and the lass who sang in her."

CHAPTER VIII--THE SHERIFF'S SUPPER PARTY

But Gilian was soon to hear the lass again.

It was a great town for supper parties. To make up, as it were, for the
lost peat-side parliaments or supper nights that for their fore-folk
made tolerable the quiet glens, the town people had many occasions of
social intercourse in each other's homes, where the winter nights, that
otherwise had been long and dreary, passed in harmless gaiety. The women
would put on their green Josephs and gaudiest quilted petticoats or
their tabinet gowns of Waterloo whose splendour kirk or