and buttered scones, and slapped their
children with a fine impartiality; while in the big houses on the Hill,
servants, walking delicately, laid out tempting tea-tables, and the
solacing smell of hot toast filled the air.

Most of the smaller houses in Priorsford were very much of one pattern
and all fairly recently built, but there was one old house, an odd
little rough stone cottage, standing at the end of a row of villas, its
back turned to its parvenu neighbours, its eyes lifted to the hills. A
flagged path led up to the front door through a herbaceous border, which
now only held a few chrysanthemums and Michaelmas daisies (Perdita would
have scorned them as flowers for the old age), but in spring and in
summer blazed in a sweet disorder of old-fashioned blossoms.

This little house was called The Rigs.

It was a queer little house, and a queer little family lived in it.
Jardine was their name, and they sat together in their living-room on
this October evening. Generally they all talked at once and the loudest
voice prevailed, but to-night there was not so much competition, and
Jean frequently found herself holding the floor alone.

David, busy packing books into a wooden box, was the reason for the
comparative quiet. He was nineteen, and in the morning he was going to
Oxford to begin his first term there. He had so long looked forward to
it that he felt dazed by the nearness of his goal. He was a good-looking
boy, with honest eyes and a firm mouth.

His only sister, Jean, four years older than himself, left the table and
sat on the edge of the box watching him. She did not offer to help, for
she knew that every man knows best how to pack his own books, but she
hummed a gay tune to prove to herself how happy was the occasion, and
once she patted David's grey tweed shoulder as he leant over her.
Perhaps she felt that he needed encouragement this last night at home.

Jock, the other brother, a schoolboy of fourteen, with a rough head and
a voice over which he had no control, was still at the tea-table. He was
rather ashamed of his appetite, but ate doggedly. "It's not that I'm
hungry just now," he would say, "but I so soon get hungry."

At the far end of the room, in a deep window, a small boy, with a dog
and a cat, was playing at being on a raft. The boy's name was Gervase
Taunton, but he was known to a large circle of acquaintances as "the
Mhor," which, as Jean would have explained to you, is Gaelic for "the