almost magic.

"Is she not fine?" he said again, clutching with eager hands at the
rail and leaning over as far as he could to lose no single note of that
alluring melody.

"Oh, the dear! the dear!" sobbed Miss Mary, moved to her inmost by the
strain. "When I heard her first I thought it was her mother, and that
too her favourite song! Oh, the dear! the dear! and I to be the sinful
woman here on any quarrel for her!"

The song ceased, a window noisily closed, and Gilian fell back with a
shock upon a wet world with roads full of mire and a salt wind from the
sea moaning in the trees behind the town.

"What--what--what are we here for?" said he, beholding for the first
time the impropriety of this eavesdropping on the part of so genteel and
sensitive a dame.

She blushed in the dark with the shame the query roused. She had thought
him too young to understand the outrage this must be on her every sense
of Highland decency, and yet he could reprove her in a single sentence!

"You may well ask," she said, moving away from that alluring house-front
with its inmates so indifferent to the passions in the dark without And
her sobs were not yet finished. "Because I prize my brothers," said
she, "and grieve at any slight upon them, must I be spy upon my dead
companion's child?" She hurried her pace away from that house whose
windows stared in a dumb censure upon her humiliation. Gilian trudged
reluctantly at her side, confounded, but she seemed almost unconscious
that he was there, till he tugged with a shy sympathy at her gown. Then
she looked and beamed upon him with the mother-face.

"Do you like that girl?" said she.

"I like her--when she sings," said he.

"Oh! it was always that," she went on helplessly "My poor brothers!
They were not to blame, and she was not to blame, at least, not very
much perhaps; if blame there was, it lay with the providence that
brought them together." Then she stopped a moment with a pitiful
exclamation: "Oh! I was the instrument of providence in their case; but
for me, that loved them all, it might never have been. What am I doing
here with you? She may have her mother's nature as well as her mother's
songs."

For once Gilian found himself with many pieces of a tale he could not
put together, for all his ingenuity. He said nothing, but fumbled
in many trials at the pieces as he and the little lady walked up the
street, now deserted but for themselves and a man's footsteps sounding
on