She came back to Schawfield from the treeless moor that hardly showed the seasons' difference, and was astonished to find the autumn almost gone; perished leaves in the ditches, the hill sides rusty with the withering bracken. Miss Amelia met her at Duntryne with the barouche, and "I hope you have brought some books with you," said that insatiable student of romance, who always found Penelope's resource in this respect a comfort. "I haven't had a thing to read for weeks except the newspapers, and everybody else in the country except ourselves has gone to London. At this time of the year one might as well be in a prison as in Schawfield."

Pen was sorry; she had brought no novels back with her; that was a commodity hardly to be expected in in the manse. "I've scarcely looked at a book since I went home," she said, "but father, every afternoon, read a chapter or two of Motley's 'Dutch Republic' to me; he has been doing it since ever I remember, and I almost like it-for the fights."

Miss Amelia grimaced. "I can't stand history!" she exclaimed," and I'm starving for a nice new novel."

"I'm tired of novels," said Pen. "It came to me lately that most of them are ridiculous. At any rate I've lost my taste for them in the meantime."

"Dear me!" said Miss Amelia. "Why?"

"I don't know. I fancy it's

because of late it has taken me all my time to keep track of Mr Maurice. The amusing thing is that in a month or two I'm likely to know as many quotations as himself, for I've discovered in a bookcase at home the chief source of his-Leigh Hunt's 'Imagination and Fancy.'" She laughed gleefully. "If I can get most of that book by heart I'll very

much astonish Mr Maurice."

"Oh, he's gone," Miss Amelia informed her. "He went off two days after you left for home, of all places in the world to go to the shipbuilding yard where he hasn't spent a week since he published his book of poems. And Norah's quite disconsolate."

A feeling of disappointment

not acute, but something like the numbness of the spirit that we feel when first we wake from a sleep that has followed deprivation, and while yet we can't recall-fell upon Pen. He was a bundle of affectations, but he had some amiable parts. As, at Portnahaven, the country people pluck the larger feathers from the tails of fowls to keep the winds of that stormy coast from blowing them out to sea, she had, from time to time, in sheer candour and common-sense, divested him of many a plume from the gorgeous peacock-tail of his artistic conceits, so giving him a more stable foothold on the common earth whereto even that glorious poet the lark is ever dragged back by love and hunger. He did not drift to sea so much of lateshe had found his cynicism less

often manifest; Fancy Farm, she honestly told herself, would not be quite the same for a day or two without him.

But Norah's welcome quite dispelled her brief regrets, and Sir Andrew met her almost boisterously. She had come in the nick of time, he said, to join them in the last cruise of the season, for he laid up the yawl on Monday. "How the days pass!" he exclaimed ruefully. "It looks as if it were only a week or two since I put out the moorings, and now it is time to snug Kittiwake down for winter. . . . Gnats! Gnats! We should need a hundred lives to do justice to the variousness and charm of things. And after? Dr Cleghorn said on Sunday, with that literal mind of his that fancies all the truth may be packed into a single Scripture sentence, that hereafter there shall be no more sea. A blue look-out for the sailorman who makes a pierhead jump at penitence, and finds on the other side that he's booked for an eternal job of holystoning mansion fronts! Eh? Hard lines on the Galilean fishermen-think of them walking, even-on, the golden streets, remembering the slat of sails and the wash along the counter!"

"Oh, there will probably be a sea," his cousin assured him blythly; "but the winds will always be sou'-west-by-west."

"If winds were always sou'west-by-west, women might be skippers," said Sir Andrew. "And there's you, Pen,-you haven't learned to hold a tiller or belay a sheet yet; it's high

time you had your lesson. What were you born for, on an island, if you want the skill to go round the edges?"

They rode next day to Whitfarland, and stabled at a farm. An east wind, tempered by a blazing sun, was blowing over the archipelago; every islet clapped its hands; the straits were deeply darkly blue, and high white continents of cloud filled up the west, hanging above the hilly isles beyond the Sound, sun-silvered, splendid. The bays were full of happy noises-plashing breakers on the pebbles, sandpipers in the dunes. The dim lights, shaded waters, fading reeds, and melancholy moaning marshes of her native parish seemed incredibly far off and undesirable to Pen: she sat in the well, silent, as they ran, close-hauled, from Kittiwake's moorings and

opened up the portals of the sea whose farther ends thrash coldly upon Labrador or feel the chafing of the ice about the Pole. The sense of space-the magnitude of nature and the smallness of herself-possessed her. They sailed for a while along the mainland, where Sir Andrew pointed out his marches. The drystone dyke that marked them rose from the sea-edge, dripping; ran through alder thicket, gorse, and withering heather to the summit of the hills, and there was lost to sight as it plunged down the inner glens.

"The Lang Dyke' they call it," he informed her. "Made by my great-grandfather, who seems to have thought he would live for ever and maintain pos

session of a substantial swatch of God's world in spite of time and revolution. And the fun of it is he's dead. Ha! ha! There's his dyke, indifferent to time, and useless to repel a mortgage, and Lang-dyke Geordie's only a little dust in a leaden shell on a shelf in the mausoleum in the grounds there, just behind the icehouse. These are the considerations that make me wonder, sometimes, if it's worth while marking anything on earth as our possession; aye, if it's worth while even to possess, more than ourselves, and a nook to sleep in, and a pot to boil our kail."

"You might add a 3-ton yawl and a friend or two," suggested Norah practically. "Isn't it time to put about? Stand by!" She kept the yawl a point or two off for a moment and then put the tiller slowly down with a "Helm's alee!" The boat shot up into the wind; Pen got a hurried first lesson on the cleat from Captain Cutlass, and let the jib-sheet fly.

They were steering now for the largest of the inner isles; the lands of Schawfield lay upon their weather; Schawfield House itself abruptly came in view through an opening in the timber, its inconsistent towers and rambling wings a a testimony to the freakishness of its various builders, but yet preserved from incongruity by the ivy crowded on all its walls. High on its terrace on the steep peninsula it looked august and arrogant; Captain

Cutlass, who loved it, strangely felt that it called for some apology. "As great a lesson in human vanity as the Lang Dyke," said he, with a look across his shoulder at it. "People imagine I own that house, when in truth the house owns me, as Mr Birrell or Cattanach could tell you. If you could turn that monstrous shell upside down you would find a snail below it-Andrew Schaw, with a budget of liabilities left for his amusement by the previous members of his family. I'll wager Mr Beswick lies on my bed at night and laughs when he thinks how easily himself and his ironmoulders have turned out the Schaws, who got in with swords. . . . Pardon our ostentation, Pen-; good heavens ! how many chimneys! What are you thinking of?"

"I was thinking of a saying of my father's," said Penelope, scarce looking at his house, but on the scene around. "It is a day of glory; the Lord is abroad."

"And I was thinking only of myself and things material! I fear I'm like Clashgour, who told me once he never thought so seriously of the Lord as when he had just got a clout on the lug from Him." He cast a sailor's eye aloft at the fluttering vane, and swept his glance along the far-off alps of cloud that now seemed less benign and stable. "We're just in time, I think, to close the season handsomely: when the wind comes round with the sun this afternoon we may have a different story; it looks

-

as if there were a lot of dirt behind there, somewhere." Presently they opened out more spacious mainland stretches remoter inland peaks and jutting promontories, flaming with woods now voiceless, autumn-burned. On one of them there stood the ruins of a keep, with tiny ashtrees, wind-blown, seeming feeble seedlings, growing on its crumbling walls, its windowopenings blue, like innocent young eyes, only the sky beyond them; its rude foundations like a portion of the rock. Daws chattered as they hopped about the broken crenels of the turrets, but the place appeared the very soul of loneliness and silence, unspeakably indifferent to sunshine and to time. Gardenless, unfenced, neglected, and their doorways choked with rubble and with weed, such castles numerously stand on western beaches, keeping the secret of their origin and darkly brooding, blind to sunsets, deaf to storms. Pen's eyes fastened on this one with inquiry and delight; every chord of the romantic fancy answered its mute appeal.

as something which, as in her own case, could be traced for only a hundred years or so.

He laughed. "It's as old as your own, and not a single generation older," he informed her. "Three sons of Noah came out of the ark; I'm descended from one of them, but have always been unable to discover which."

Norah, keeping the little vessel full and bye, her face sparkling with the pleasure of her occupation, looked at him where he lay stretched upon the deck and cryptically smiled. "I hope you're not deceived by those fine democratic sentiments, Pen," she said. "Behold in the humble gentleman one who is absurdly proud of his long descent."

"Not proud of it," he corrected cheerfully; "neither glad nor sorry, like a dog at its father's funeral, but just contented with a genealogy which depends, for its identity, on some delightfully musty parchments. Were it not for the parchments, Norah, and that old castle, and the grip our people fastened very early on this coast (let us not inquire too closely how they got it), I probably wouldn't have known the name of my great-grandfather. All the same he would have been there, and was bound to have a name too. It's not the Schaws who have been continuous, but Schawfield, and I'm honestly glad to think of that of the old castle faithful to all the girls they brought in as brides, giving them a strong warm home, a rugged welcome; but their names are forgotten