thank the
Almighty effusively. Born and reared in the uncompromising tenets of
Scotch Presbyterianism, her attitude towards Nan was one of rigid
disapproval--a disapproval that warred somewhat pathetically against
the affection with which the girl's essential lovableness inspired her.
For there was no gainsaying the charm of the Davenant women! But Eliza
still remembered very clearly the sense of shocked dismay which, years
ago, had overwhelmed her righteous soul on learning that her only
brother, Andrew McDermot, had become engaged to one of the beautiful
Davenant sisters.

In those days the insane extravagances and lawlessness of the Davenant
family had become proverbial. There had been only three of them left
to carry on the wild tradition--Timothy, Nan's father, who feared
neither man nor devil, but could wile a bird off a tree or a woman's
heart from her keeping, and his two sisters, whose beauty had broken
more hearts than their kindness could ever mend. And not one of the
three had escaped the temperamental heritage which Angele de Varincourt
had grafted on to a parent stem of dare-devil, reckless English growth.

The McDermots of Tarn, on the other hand, traced their descent in a
direct line from one of the unbending old Scotch Covenanters of 1638,
and it had always been a source of vague bewilderment to Eliza that a
race sprang from so staunchly Puritan a stock should have been juggled
by that inimitable trickster, Fate, into allying itself with a family
in whose veins ran the hot French blood of the Varincourts.

Perhaps old Dame Nature in her garnered wisdom could have explained the
riddle. Certain it was that no sooner had Andrew McDermot set eyes
upon Gabrielle Davenant--sister to that Annabel whom Lord St. John had
loved and married--than straightway the visions of his youth, in which
he had pictured some staid and modest-seeming Scotswoman as his
helpmeet, were swept away by an overwhelming Celtic passion of love and
romance of which he had not dreamed that he could be possessed.

It was a meeting of extremes, and since Gabrielle had drooped and pined
in the bleak northern castle where the lairds of Tarn had dwelt from
time immemorial, McDermot laid even his ancestral home upon love's
altar and, coming south, had bought Trevarthen Wood, a tree-girt,
sheltered house no great distance from Mallow, though further inland.

But the change was made too late to accomplish its purpose of renewing
Gabri