pretty, and had an amiable look, and was soft
and fine and delicate in her manners and speech. The charming simplicity
of her costume, too: had anybody ever seen a dress more beautiful with
less pretence of attracting notice? Her very hands--they seemed objects
fitted to be placed on a cushion of blue velvet under a glass shade, so
white and small and perfectly formed were they. That was what the
kindly-hearted Janet thought. She did not ask herself how these hands
would answer if called upon to help--amidst the grime and smoke of a
shepherd's hut--the shepherd's wife to patch together a pair of homespun
trousers for the sailor son coming back from the sea.

"And now," said Keith Macleod to his fair neighbor, when Hamish had put
the claret and the whiskey on the table, "since your head is well now,
would you like to hear the pipes? It is an old custom of the house. My
mother would think it strange to have it omitted," he added, in a lower
voice.

"Oh, if it is a custom of the house," she said, coldly--for she thought
it was inconsiderate of him to risk bringing back her headache--"I have
no objection whatever."

And so he turned to Hamish and said something in the Gaelic. Hamish
replied in English, and loud enough for Miss White to hear.

"It is no pibroch there will be this night, for Donald is away."

"Away?"

"Ay, just that. When he wass come back from the boat, he will say to me,
'Hamish, it is no more of me or my pipes they want at Dare, and I am
going away; and they can get some one else to play the pipes.' And I
wass saying to him then, 'Donald, do not be a foolish lad; and if the
English lady will not want the pibroch you made for her, perhaps at
another time she will want it.' And now, Sir Keith, it is Maggie
MacFarlane; she wass coming up from Loch-na-Keal this afternoon, and who
was it she will meet but our Donald, and he wass saying to her, 'It is
to Tobermory now that I am going, Maggie; and I will try to get a ship
there; for it is no more of me or my pipes they will want at Dare.'"

This was Hamish's story; and the keen hawk-like eye of him was fixed on
the English lady's face all the time he spoke in his struggling and
halting fashion.

"Confound the young rascal!" Macleod said, with his face grown red. "I
suppose I shall have to send a messenger to Tobermory and apologize to
him for interrupting him to-day." And then he turned to Miss White.
"They are like a set of children," he said, "with the