hen who has
clucked over a brood of her own!"

"Safer, too, here," approved my grandfather, nodding his head; "the
tarry breeches will think twice before paying Heathknowes a visit--with
the lads about and the gate shut, and maybe the old dog not quite
toothless yet!"

This, indeed, was the very heart of the matter. Irma and Sir Louis would
be far safer at the house of one William Lyon, guarded by his stout
sons, by his influence over the wildest spirits of the community, in a
house garrisoned by a horde of sleepless sheep-dogs, set in a defensible
square of office-houses, barns, byres, stables, granaries, cart-sheds,
peat-sheds and the rest.

"And when the great arrive to call," said Aunt Jen, with sour insight,
"you, mother, will stop the churning just when the butter is coming to
put on your black lace cap and apron. You will receive the lady of the
manse, and Mrs. General Johnstone, and----"

"And if I do, Jen," cried her mother, "what is that to you?"

"Because I have enough to do as it is," snapped Jen, "without your
butter-making when you are playing the lady down the house!"

Grandmother's black eyes crackled fire. She turned threateningly to her
daughter.

"By my saul, Lady Lyon," she cried, "there is a stick in yon corner that
ye ken, and if you are insolent to your mother I will thrash you
yet--woman-grown as ye are. Ye take upon yourself to say that which none
of your brothers dare set their tongue to!"

And indeed there is little doubt but that Mary Lyon would have kept her
word. So far as speech was concerned, my Aunt Jen was silenced. But she
was a creature faithful to her prejudices, and could express by her
silence and air of injured rectitude more than one less gifted could
have put into a parliamentary oration.

Her very heels on the stone floor of the wide kitchen at Heathknowes,
where all the business of the house was transacted, fell with little
raps of defiance, curt and dry. Her nose in the air told of contempt
louder than any words. She laid down the porridge spurtle like a queen
abdicating her sceptre. She tabled the plates like so many protests,
signed and witnessed. She swept about the house with the glacial chill
which an iceberg spreads about it in temperate seas. Her displeasure
made winter of our content--of all, that is, except Mary Lyon's. She at
least went about her tasks with her usual humming alacrity, turning work
over her shoulder as easy as apple-peeling.

Being natu