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else, seemed to draw her back to her senses. With a lovely bow, she would rise and leave the room.

Still later, under the starlight and the mild, sweet air of Naples, I was allowed to smoke my cigar on their balcony. Then I used to think of our evenings in Florence, a year ago; for Feena would insist on coming into the open with a chair, and sitting with her hair down for the moon to shine upon. How her eyes would gleam in the half shadow, to be sure! There was something almost terrifying in their splendour.

It might chance that the Neapolitan

This is the last, hitherto, that I have heard of Feena. I could not stay longer in Naples. Mrs. Stanhope promised to give me intelligence of what transpired after this crushing step; but I have not heard from her either. This, to me, implies the worst possible.

Some day I may see her again; but I may sincerely say that I hope not. I do not care to think what she would look like now.

And yet, from the first, she was more sinned against than sinning.

ballad singers would come round at such THE THIRTEENTH BRYDAIN.

a time. Nothing then would suit Feena's turn, but she must fling a lira or two to them, and keep them strumming sentimental airs by the half hour-she and I on the balcony, and a crowd of the Neapolitan youth below! It was not altogether good form; and in a girl suing for a divorce, it was more than indiscreet. Well, I must hurry to the end-the sad end.

The divorce suit came on, and failed. The King had heard much of Feena and her beauty, had seen her at a reception, and got an exaggerated idea of her conduct. It was just what was sure to happen. But it came as a bad blow to both Mrs. Stanhope and myself.

I don't think it affected Feena very much. She pretended to laugh and make light of it.

"Let him come and take me, if he dare," she said, alluding to her husband, the false Marchese.

But all the while it was plain she was drifting nearer and nearer to the goal which it is ruin for any woman to touch.

She was more and more with her noble acquaintances of Naples; and there were times when so her mother told me she insisted on being alone with them in these drives.

"Why not take her away?" I asked. "Because she has said she will not go," was the dolorous reply. "She has been her own bane, poor girl, and I don't know what to do."

It was about a week after this that one day I received a note from Mrs. Stanhope asking me to come round to the hotel immediately.

I did so, to find that Feena had gone off in the yacht of a young Count, who had been one of her most persistent followers.

BY MARGARET MOULE.

Author of "Catherine Maidment's Burden," "Benefit of
Clergy," "Mr. Wingrove's Ways," "The Vicar's
Aunt," "Dick's Wije," etc.

CHAPTER I.

It was an April afternoon, but the air was full of east wind. The clouds which had gathered slowly all the morning lay in heavy grey masses, very low, and very near to the earth; and their nearness so intensified their heaviness as to make it seem almost oppressive. It was very dark, from the effect of these same masses of clouds. Once or twice during the afternoon the clouds had broken suddenly and left a long, silver-edged rift, from which a cold ray of light had streamed out; but this was only for a moment at a time. The next, they had rolled heavily together again and were again driven slowly before the east wind. Side by side with the darkness caused by the clouds, and seeming to struggle with it, was the clear, cold glare which is an inseparable accompaniment of an east wind. It is not light in itself; neither does it give any light; it merely accentuates in the clear distinctness which it brings to every detail in a landscape the bitter keenness of the swordedged wind that is sweeping across it with merciless cutting power.

In its clearness the hills, on this cold spring afternoon, stood out against the grey clouds with a sharp outline; and every tuft of withered brown heather on them, every grey crag of stone, even the dead fragments of last year's bracken, stood out also. The road that led over the brow of the nearest hill gleamed in the cold clearness like a broad, white ribbon. At the foot of the hills lay a deep ravine, which seemed to cut off the hills abruptly from the landscape opposite. The ravine

was wooded on either bank, and of the trees in it, bent as they were before the wind, every branch and every trunk seemed to be defined and separated from its fellow, so distinct were their outlines in the bitter light. Just above the ravine, on the opposite side to the hills, lay a little village; and to-day every angle of its cottage roofs, every twist in the crooked little chimneys, and every curl of blue smoke that struggled up from them, looked as if it had been drawn with a sharp and very dark pencil against a heavy, indefinite background. The village ran irregularly along the bank of the ravine to its head, where, just above the spot at which it suddenly ended, stood, dark and lowering against the sky, a grey stone house, tall and square, with an octagonal turret at one corner.

If the rest of the landscape looked bleak and dreary in the bitter wind, the grey stone house seemed to attract to itself all the most gloomy characteristics of the day, and by its very form and presence to accentuate them a hundredfold.

The very wind seemed to gain an added sharpness as it whistled round the four gaunt grey walis; the cold light seemed more weird and unnatural for touching the panes of glass in the narrow windows, and the dreary stretch of moorland behind seemed far more dreary for the tall, forbidding outline on its edge.

All day long the grimness of that grey stone building had seemed to possess an irresistible attraction for the inhabitants of Brydain the little village which had lain on the bank of the ravine and faced those dark Perthshire hills for centuries. Very few of its inhabitants had left their own houses on this bitter day, but of those who had, none had gone out or none come in without a glance at the tall, gaunt building. Of the men who, at five o'clock, were beginning to come home from their outdoor work with steps that were quick and hurrying in their desire to gain shelter from the cold misery of the day, no one of them as they entered the village was, as usual, speculating on the next day's weather, or talking over his neighbour's concerns with his comrades; but one and all directed their eyes to the grey stone house, and looked it at with a distinct look of curiosity and unusual interest.

Just as three or four of them approached the village, a door of one of the cottages, at the end furthest from the grey stone house, was opened, and an old woman came out holding a kettle in her hand.

She was withered and bent with age, and the high cap she wore seemed by its size to make her small frame look smaller still. She clasped her shawl across her tightly as she felt the first breath of the east wind.

'Ech, but it's cauld!' she said to herself; and then she, as if instinctively, turned towards the grey house also. "Yon 'll be dree the day," she said, shivering. Then, seeming to remember the kettle she held, she crossed the road with trembling steps and tried to fill it at the little burn which ran down the side of the ravine to join a wider stream at the bottom. But her hands trembled with cold as well as with age, and the handle of the kettle slipped from her shaking old fingers and rolled down the bank. The old woman stood watching it helplessly until it was caught and held by a tuft of brushwood, and then she looked around almost imploringly as if for help to recover it. Just at this moment the little group of men who had been approaching the village reached it, and the foremost, catching sight of her face, quickened his steps. He was a lad of about nineteen, stalwart and strong, though short and thick-set.

"What ails you, Elspeth?" he said. "What is it you are wanting?"

The old woman, in a quavering voice, explained what had happened, and in another moment Sandy Macfarlane was actively scrambling down among among the heather and brushwood beside the burn in pursuit of the kettle.

Meanwhile, the other men had come up, and, after a glance at Sandy, seemed to find comments unnecessary.

"He'll be back just now," observed the most communicative; and then they, like the old woman, turned towards the grey stone house. She turned with them, apparently forgetting entirely, for the moment, Sandy, the kettle, and the bitter wind, for she let her shawl fall apart as she held out her hand towards the stone house.

"And so the Laird's end came to him the same way as his fore-elders'," she said. "It's plain they must all dree their weird."

"His burying was a gran' sight," said the man who had spoken before; after an almost imperceptible pause, during which he seemed to be striving to find a different channel for the conversation, "and the minister was gey gifted at the grave.'

"

"And the laddie'll be by his lane," continued old Elspeth, "and he'll be by his lane till his life's end," she added, reflec

tively. "And what'll he be doing the golden-brown. day, think you, poor bit laddie ? "

"Is it Brydain you're calling a bit laddie, then?" asked another man, who looked about five-and-twenty. "He will be of one age with myself."

"And what other will you call yourself, Tammas Macgregor?" said the old woman, turning round on him sharply. "I held you in my arms when you wore your swathing-clothes, and I held Brydain the same! It'll be wae for him up there by his lane with Mackenzie," she added, after a pause, in which she took breath after her brief outburst of wrath.

"The young Laird'll marry on a wife," struck in Sandy Macfarlane, cheerily. He had joined the group unobserved, a moment or two before, holding the recovered kettle in his hand. But with his words an odd silence fell. There was a pause, and then old Elspeth's voice sounded a little more tremulous as she said, slowly :

"He'll no be for marrying, you ken." Sandy Macfarlane, and the young man. of whose age Elspeth had been so contemptuous, simultaneously turned to her at this. There was a mixed expression on both their faces, consisting of incredulous disagreement with her words, or their meaning, which they seemed fully to understand, and a deprecatory respect for her age, which made them both hesitate. But young Macgregor apparently overcame this, for he was just about to speak when the words were checked on his very lips by a sudden movement on the part of Elspeth.

The laddie himsel'!" she said. And the men, with a hasty glance round at the road, touched their caps roughly but heartily.

The salutation was returned by a young man who had come up the village street unnoticed, and now passed the little group with one or two rapid strides. In the clear, cold glow every line of his figure and face was as distinct as the details of the scene around. He was tall-his height could not have been far short of six feet-and he was very broad-shouldered. His head was bowed, so as to avoid the full blast of the wind, but his face, or what could be seen of it above the plaid that was thrown twice round his shoulders, and the cap which was pulled rather low on his forehead, was evidently handsome. A pair of very keen, very deep-set blue eyes glanced at the group as he saluted them, and the hair which showed below it was of a bright

He was wearing a dark

tweed suit, with a band of wide crape on his left arm. There was something rather pathetic and inconsistent about the strong young figure and its signs of mourning that seemed, as the young man passed on, to stop Thomas Macgregor and Sandy Macfarlane from beginning the argument they had prepared for old Elspeth. They watched the tall figure for a moment in silence, and then, with a brief good-night, Sandy handed Elspeth her kettle, and the group scattered itself into its component fragments, Sandy and the other men respectively seeking their various homes, while old Elspeth very slowly recrossed the road to her cottage with the kettle, which, besides recovering, Sandy had filled for her.

"Poor bit laddie!" she said again, as she opened the door. "It's no to be expected that I should live to see his end, for which of us can tell how it'll be fulfilled?"

Meanwhile the tall young man had walked on, past all the cottages of Brydain that were near enough and regular enough to consider themselves as part of the street. They grew more and more straggling towards the end, and finally were succeeded by very bare-looking fields, separated from the rough track along which he was walking by a low grey stone wall. A little later the fields and the track ended together, and the stone wall, taking a sharp turn, crossed the young man's path. There was in it a large, rough wooden gate; he opened it with a quick touch to its clumsy latch, and it swung back wide, leaving exposed the dreary stretch of moorland on which stood the grey stone house. Across this, from the gate, led a rough road-in reality only a bridle-path, widened by years and centuries of use into something approaching a carriage-road. It was undivided in any way from the moor until about half way between the gate and the house, where it was bordered on each side by treesstraggling, twisted pine-trees and larches, whose stems were completely bare of branches on the windward side. The young man strode along the road, and under the trees, towards the grey stone house, which seemed with nearness to grow gaunter and grimmer still.

The "Great House," as it was called in Brydain, must have been named from comparison alone, for, intrinsically, the name was inappropriate enough.

It was built round a very small inner

square, and it was in itself by no means large. The high walls were of smooth, squared stone, which had no ivy or creeping plants to soften its hard surface. The windows were few and very small; many of them still retained the lancet form which the builder of the house had probably found the best adapted for security from his enemies. They had been slightly altered on the side facing the dark hills, and widened; but even those which had been so treated still presented the idea rather of a necessary outlook for the dwellers within, than that of windows to admit sun and air.

On the side to which the approach edged by the wind-blown pines led up there were no windows at all. The cold grey façade was broken only by a heavy doorway, with stone mouldings, ending in a crest consisting of a lion's head.

The turret, which stood at the eastern corner, was pierced with several lancets in Its upper storey. From the ground below they seemed only like darker slits in a grey ground; but in reality they commanded a wide view down the ravine, to the crest of the hills, and over the dreary moor. There was no garden; the house was bordered by a narrow strip of ground shut in by a wire fence. But the enclosure contained only a few stunted shrubs. On the southern side-that facing the moor-the enclosure was a little wider, and bore traces of what had apparently once been a few flower-beds; but they were bare and empty enough. There was no sign of any life about them, and their very outlines were indistinct and vague.

The young man passed under the last of the trees, reached the stone doorway, lifted the heavy twisted iron ring that served as a handle to the dark oak door, opened it, and entered, letting the door fall together behind him with a crash.

CHAPTER IL

THREE hours had passed since the young man had let himself in at the heavy stone doorway. It was past eight o'clock, and he was sitting by the fire in a room bright and warm with the dancing flames. The room was not inconsistent with the outer aspect of the house-that is to say, its furniture was not. It was sombre, and dark, and scanty. There was a square oak table in the middle of the room, with no cloth upon it, and its shining surface bore in places marks of long and rough use.

There was a smaller table which might have been a writing-table between two of the windows, and there were a few uncushioned oak chairs set against the walls. At the end opposite to the fireplace stood an enormous oak sideboard or dresser. It was so large, high, and altogether disproportionate to the wall against which it stood, that it gave the impression of having been put together where it stood; and such, indeed, was the case. It was darker even than the table, and carved at each corner of the curious canopy which formed its heading with the same lion's head that made the finials of the mouldings on the doorway. Its dark recesses seemed deeper and darker for two brilliantly polished silver tankards and a silver tray which shone conspicuously on one of its shelves.

There was neither carpet nor curtains in the room, and the windows were closed only with massive shutters. But in spite of its scanty furnishing, the room was by no means uncomfortable or cheerless. There was over all the sombre appointments an air of careful keeping and familiar use which would have made them look welcoming, and to a certain degree inviting, even to a stranger.

The firelight danced up and down the young man's figure, making it and his face even more distinct against the dark background than it had been in the cold light as he walked through Brydain village three hours earlier. Now that his face was free from the shelter of plaid or cap, all its points showed, and the beauty of his deep-set blue eyes and straight brows was decidedly added to by his firm, square chin and the heavy moustache that was golden-brown, like his hair.

He was leaning back in his chair, his feet on the hearthstone, and of his hands, one was behind his head, the other laid on his knee. They were curious hands, strong and tanned; they were evidently the hands of a man used to an athletic, outdoor life, but at the same time they were long and rather thin, and the fingers had a flexible unusual form that seemed, taken with their strength, to speak of a mixed and unusual nature in their owner. His blue eyes were unusual also. They were so deep-set as to be remarkable from that characteristic alone; and their blue was that deep, clear, yet not actually dark blue that is very seldom seen. The expres sion in them at the moment was dreamy and abstracted, and though they were fixed on the flames, it was very evident that the

young man saw none of their dancing light. This expression was indefinably increased by a thin line that ran between them, across his forehead-a thin blue vein, at moments almost imperceptible, at others, as at this, curiously conspicuous through the bronzed skin.

About his whole figure, as he sat alone in the long bright room, there was the same inconsistent pathos that had so unconsciously influenced old Elspeth and the men in Brydain village.

The flames grew higher and higher and curled faster and faster round the great logs of wood; but the young man did not move nor alter his position in the least. The flames reached their height and began to sink a little, and to retreat from the charred wood like a fast-ebbing tide from the shore, while the wood itself began to glow a deep red. As if the alteration in the light of the room, made by their sinking, had unconsciously reached and affected the far-distant current of his thoughts, the young man stirred slightly, and as he stirred he sighed heavily, and his eyes wandered from the fire to rest wistfully on the empty chair with the worn old red cushion which stood opposite to him. As they rested there, their blue grew rather dim, and the young man raised one hand and brushed it across them hastily. Turning back to the fire, he kicked one of the great logs until a shower of sparks flew from its glowing mass up the chimney.

At this moment the door of the room, which was in the shadow of the great dresser, opened quickly. The pale yellow light of a candle streamed across the red glow, carried by a man, who walked up the room with hasty steps.

He was not to be described exactly as an old man, though his years were far past those of middle age. He stooped a little, and his walk lacked vigour, but his hair, though scanty, was not grey, and in the eyes that shone out of a thin, withered face, was all their share of keen intelligence. He wore black clothes, which, from their evident newness and stiffness, gave him an angular appearance.

"Maister Keith!" he exclaimed; "and why for have you no licht, when it's awaitin' you at your hand?"

He set down his candle as he spoke, and coming behind the young man's chair, took an unlighted lamp from a bracket by his side. "I've not required a lamp, thank you, Mackenzie," answered the young man.

"And if you've not," was the instant

response, "that's no sayin' you'd not have been the better of one !"

He lighted the lamp, set it again on the bracket, and went out of the room, to return a moment later with a cloth over his arm. This he spread on the upper end of the table, and proceeded to set supper upon it. During this last process he fidgeted about the room far more than was necessary, and cast at the same time many looks at his silent young master. More than once he seemed to be about to speak, but each time his courage seemed to fail him, and to evaporate in an increase of energy directed towards the appointments of the table. Finally, he came up to the hearth and placed a log on the fire, bending over it and adjusting it to a nicety.

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Supper's ready," he said, laconically. Then, as if emboldened by accumulated effort: "If you'll no be finding me ower bold, Maister Keith-I ask your pardonBrydain

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"I'm in no hurry to be called Brydain," put in the young man in a low voice.

"I was going to ask you what you would be doing? You willna bide by your lane?"

"I've thought of many plans, Mackenzie, and I believe I have decided."

"You'll not decide to bide your lanenot at the first?" said Mackenzie. "You'll ask another to bide here with you for a bit? Couldna you ask any o' your London friends? And there's the young laird at Greystanes. You'll forgive my liberty, Brydain," he ended, breaking off suddenly, with a deprecating look on his face.

"It's not a liberty, Mackenzie," answered the young man. "You are, now"the mist gathered again before the blue eyes, only to be instantly repressed-" you are my oldest friend; you have known me all my life, and it would be odd, indeed, if I did not tell you what I have decided. Come back after supper and I'll tell you all my plans."

Mackenzie, with a look of great satisfaction on his withered face, made a gesture that was half assent and half respect, and taking up his candle, went out of the room,

Twenty minutes later the young man rose from the table at which he had half mechanically taken his place on Mackenzie's departure and rang the bell. It was responded to by Mackenzie so quickly as to suggest the possibility of his having awaited it somewhere very near at hand.

"It's gey small the supper you'll have

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