it is not good to be that man.

But in those days, being a boy, carried along in the waft of my
grandmother's skirt, I knew nothing about such things.

I watched my grandmother take the antique knocker between her fingers,
noting with housewifely approval that it had recently been polished. I
have seldom passed a more uncomfortable time of waiting, than that
between the resounding clatter of grandmother's knocking reverberating
through the empty house, and the patter of feet, the whispering, and at
last the opening of the door.

Then I saw again the tall girl with the proudly angled chin, the crown
of raven curls, and the pair of brave outlooking eyes that met all the
world with something that was even a little bold.

I had been afraid that my grandmother, so indiscriminating in her
admonitions, might open fire upon this forlorn couple, isolated in the
great haunted house of Marnhoul. But I need not have troubled.

My grandmother had the instinct of caressing maternity for all the
young, the forlorn, the helpless. So she only opened her arms and cried
out, "Oh, you dears--you poor darlings!"

And the little boy, moved by the instinctive yearning of all that needed
protection, of everything of tender years and little strength towards
the breast that had suckled and the hands that had nursed, let go his
sister's hand and ran happily to my grandmother. She caught him in her
arms and lifted him up with the easy habitual gesture of one long
certified as a mother in Israel. He threw his little arms about my
grandmother's neck, nestling there just as the rest of us used to do
when we were in any trouble.

"I like you! You are good!" he said.

Miss Irma and I were therefore left eye to eye while Louis Maitland, in
spite of his title, was so rapidly making friends with the actual head
of our family.

Irma eyed me, and I did the like to Miss Irma--that is, to the best of
my ability, which in this matter was nothing to hers. She seemed to look
me through and through. At which I quailed, and then she appeared a
little more content.

With the child still in her arms, and her voice, lately so harsh in
rebuke, now tuned to the cooing of a nesting dove, my grandmother
introduced herself.

"Child," she said to Miss Irma, "I am your nearest neighbour. Who should
come to welcome you if not I? You will find me at the farm of
Heathknowes. It is my goodman's saw-mills that you hear clattering from
where you stand, and I am com