invest a silly but accidental situation with all the superficial
dignity of tragedy.

What must it have meant to Colonel Arran, to this quiet, slow,
respectable man of the world, to find his girl wife crying in the
moonlight, and a hot-headed boy down on his knees, mumbling the
lace edge of her skirts?

What must it have meant to him--for the chances were that he had
not spoken the first word--to be confronted by an excited,
love-smitten, reckless boy, and have a challenge flung in his face
before he had uttered a word.

No doubt his calm reply was to warn the boy to mind his business
under penalty of law. No doubt the exasperated youth defied
him--insulted him--declared his love--carried the other child off
her feet with the exaggerated emotion and heroics. And, once off
their feet, she saw how the tide had swept them together--swept
them irrevocably beyond reason and recall.

Ailsa rose and stood by the open window, looking out across the
hills; but her thoughts were centred on Colonel Arran's tragedy,
and the tragedy of those two hot-headed children whom his
punishment had out-lawed.

Doubtless his girl wife had told him how the boy had come to be
there, and that she had banished him; but the clash between
maturity and adolescence is always inevitable; the misunderstanding
between ripe experience and Northern logic, and emotional
inexperience and Southern impulse was certain to end in disaster.

Ailsa considered; and she knew that now her brief for Colonel Arran
was finished, for beyond the abstract right she had no sympathy
with the punishment he had dealt out, even though his conscience
and civilisation and the law of the land demanded the punishment of
these erring' ones.

No, the punishment seemed too deeply tainted with vengeance for her
to tolerate.

A deep unhappy sigh escaped her. She turned mechanically, seated
herself, and resumed her sewing.

"I suppose I ought to be asleep," she said. "I am on duty
to-night, and they've brought in so many patients from the new
regiments."

Celia bent and bit off her thread, then passing the needle into the
hem, laid her work aside.

"Honey-bud," she said, "you are ve'y tired. If you'll undress I'll
give you a hot bath and rub you and brush your hair."

"Oh, Celia, will you? I'd feel so much better." She gave a dainty
little shudder and made a wry face, adding:

"I've had so many dirty, sick men to cleanse--oh, incredibly dirty
and horrid!--poor bo