s; and a touch of embarrassment seemed
added to the inveterate habit.

"I hear the ladies had pleasant weather." Finlay remarked.

"Capital--capital! You won't smoke? I know nothing about these cigars;
they're some Grant left behind him--a chimney, that man Grant. Well,
Finlay"--he threw himself into the arm-chair on the other side of the
hearth--"I don't know what to say to you."

"Surely," said Finlay restively, "it has all been said, sir."

"No, it has not all been said," Dr Drummond retorted. "No, it has
not. There's more to be said, and you must hear it, Finlay, with such
patience as you have. But I speak the truth when I say that I don't know
how to begin."

The young man gave him opportunity, gazing silently into the fire.
He was hardly aware that Dr Drummond had again left his seat when he
started violently at a clap on the shoulder.

"Finlay!" exclaimed the Doctor. "You won't be offended? No--you couldn't
be offended!"

It was half-jocular, half-anxious, wholly inexplicable.

"At what," asked Hugh Finlay, "should I be offended?"

Again, with a deep sigh, the Doctor dropped into his chair. "I see
I must begin at the beginning," he said. But Finlay, with sudden
intuition, had risen and stood before him trembling, with a hand against
the mantelpiece.

"No," he said, "if you have anything to tell me of importance, for God's
sake begin at the end."

Some vibration in his voice went straight to the heart of the Doctor,
banishing as it travelled, every irrelevant thing that it encountered.

"Then the end is this, Finlay," he said. "The young woman, Miss Christie
Cameron, whom you were so wilfully bound and determined to marry, has
thrown you over--that is, if you will give her back her word--has jilted
you--that is, if you'll let her away. Has thought entirely better of the
matter."

("He stared out of his great sockets of eyes as if the sky had fallen,"
Dr Drummond would say, recounting it.)

"For--for what reason?" asked Finlay, hardly yet able to distinguish
between the sound of disaster and the sense that lay beneath.

"May I begin at the beginning?" asked the Doctor, and Hugh silently
nodded.

("He sat there and never took his eyes off me, twisting his fingers. I
might have been in a confession-box," Dr Drummond would explain to her.)

"She came here, Miss Cameron, with that good woman, Mrs Kilbannon, it
will be three weeks next Monday," he said, with all the air of beginning
a story that wo