n the morning when I set sail for Edinboro', I
felt to be forever drawing nigher its skurry and bustle, its sins and
pleasures and commotions.

We had no father,--Margray, or Effie, or Mary Strathsay, or I. He had
brought his wife out from their home in Scotland to St. Anne's in the
Provinces, and had died or ever I was born,--and I was the last of the
weans. A high, keen spirit was his wife; she did not bend or break; a
stroke that would have beggared another took no crumb from her cloth;
she let the right in warehouses and wharves lie by, and lie by, and each
year it paid her sterling income. None ever saw tear in those proud eyes
of hers, when they brought in her husband dead, or when they carried him
out; but every day at noon she went up into her own room, and whether
she slept or whether she waked the two hours in that darkened place,
there was not so much as a fly that sang in the pane to tell.

She was a fair, stately woman, taller than any of her girls, and with
half the mind to hate them all because they were none of them a son.
More or less the three were like her, lofty brows and shining hair and
skin like morning light, the lave of them,--but as for me, I was
my father's child. There's a portrait of him now, hangs on the
chimney-pier: a slight man, and not tall,--the dark hair waves away on
either side the low, clear brow,--the eyes deep-set, and large and
dark and starry,--a carmine just flushing beneath the olive of the
cheek,--the fine firm mouth just breaking into smiles; and I remember
that that morning when I set sail for Edinboro', as I turned away from
gazing on that face, and saw myself glinting like a painted ghost in the
long dim mirror beside me, I said it indeed, and proudly, that I was my
father's own child.

So she kissed us, Effie and me. Perhaps mine lingered the longer, for
the color in my cheek was deeper tinct than Scotch, it was the wild bit
of Southern blood that had run in her love's veins; when she looked
at me, I gave her back hot phases of her passionate youth again,--so
perhaps mine was the kiss that left the deeper dint.

Margray, and Mary Strathsay, had been back three years from school, and
the one was just married,--and if she left her heart out of the bargain,
what was that to me?--and the other was to reign at home awhile ere the
fated Prince should come, and Effie and myself were to go over seas and
take their old desks in the famous school at Edinboro'. The mother knew