go back to his mother; he was crowing and
pulling Jean's flaxen hair, and would not heed Fay's sad little
blandishments.

"The bairns are like auld folks," remarked Jean, triumphant at her
success, and eager to point a moral; "they can not bide what is not
bright. There is a time for everything, as Solomon says, 'a time to
mourn and a time to dance;' but there is never a time for a bairn to
be sair-hearted; neither nature nor Solomon would hold with that, as
Master Fergus would say. Ech, sirs! but he is a fine preacher, is
Master Fergus."

Fay took Jean's reproof very humbly. She shed no more tears when her
baby was in her arms. It was touching to see how she strove to banish
her grief, that the baby smiles might not be dimmed. Jean would nod
her head with grim approval over her pile of finely ironed things as
she heard Fay singing in a low sweet voice, and the baby's delighted
coos answering her. A lump used to come in Jean's throat, and a
suspicious moisture to her keen blue eyes, as she would open the door
in the twilight and see the child-mother kneeling down beside the
old-fashioned cradle, singing him to sleep. "He likes the songs about
the angels best," Fay would say, looking up wistfully in Jean's face.
"I sing him all my pretty songs, only not the sad ones. I am sure he
loves me to do it."

"May be the bairn does not know his mither apart from the women
angels," muttered Jean, in a gruff aside, as she laid down her pile of
dainty linen. Jean knew more than any one else; she could have told
her mistress, if she chose, that it was odd that all Mrs. St. Clair's
linen was marked "F. Redmond." But she kept her own counsel.

Jean would not have lifted a finger to restore Fay to her husband. The
blunt Scotch handmaiden could not abide men--"a puir-hearted, feckless
lot," as she was wont to say. Of course the old master and Mr. Fergus
were exceptions to this. Jean worshiped her master; and though she
held the doctrine of original sin, would never have owned that Mr.
Fergus had a fault. But to the rest of mankind she was suspiciously
uncharitable. "To think he drove her from him--the puir bit lammie,"
she would say; "and yet the law can't have the hanging of him.
Redmond, indeed! but he won't own to any such name. It is lucky the
old mistress is not ower sharp-sighted--but there, such an idea would
never get into her head."

Fay's secret was quite safe with Jean, and, as the weeks and months
went on, a feeling of