w could he resent her giving instructions to the
cook, when it was his own dinner that profited thereby?

"Well, Gerty," he said that evening after dinner, "what do you think
about Mr. ----'s offer? It is very good-natured of him to let you have
the ordering of the drawing-room scene, for you can have the furniture
and the color to suit your own costume."

"Indeed I shall have nothing whatever to do with it," said she,
promptly. "The furniture at home is enough for me. I don't wish to
become the upholsterer of a theatre."

"You are very ungrateful, then. Half the effect of a modern comedy is
lost because the people appear in rooms which resemble nothing at all
that people ever lived in. Here is a man who gives you _carte blanche_
to put a modern drawing-room on the stage; and your part would gain
infinitely from having real surroundings. I consider it a very
flattering offer."

"And perhaps it is, pappy," said she, "but I think I do enough if I get
through my own share of the work. And it is very silly of him to want me
to introduce a song into this part, too. He knows I can't sing--"

"Gerty!" her sister said.

"Oh, you know as well as I. I can get through a song well enough in a
room; but I have not enough voice for a theatre; and although he says
it is only to make the drawing-room scene more realistic--and that I
need not sing to the front--that is all nonsense. I know what it is
meant for--to catch the gallery. Now I refuse to sing for the gallery."

This was decided enough.

"What was the song you put into your last part, Gerty?" her sister
asked. "I saw something in the papers about it."

"It was a Scotch one, Carry; I don't think you know it."

"I wonder it was not a Highland one," her sister said, rather
spitefully.

"Oh, I have a whole collection of Highland ones now, would you like to
hear one? Would you, pappy?"

She went and fetched the book, and opened the piano.

"It is an old air that belonged to Scarba," she said, and then she sang,
simply and pathetically enough, the somewhat stiff and cumbrous English
translation of the Gaelic words. It was the song of the exiled Mary
Macleod, who, sitting on the shores of "sea-worn Mull," looks abroad on
the lonely islands of Scarba, and Islay, and Jura, and laments that she
is far away from her own home.

"How do you like it, pappy?" she said, when she had finished. "It is a
pity I do not know the Gaelic. They say that when the chief heard these
ve