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FANCY FARM.

BY NEIL MUNRO,

AUTHOR OF 'JOHN SPLENDID,' 'THE DAFT DAYS,' ETC.

CHAPTER XXXI.

THEY breakfasted that morning in a littered dwelling, for the village folk, who had helped to quell the fire, in an excess of zeal had emptied threatened rooms of furniture, and, in the way of hurried flittings, heaped where the notion took them. Pen's room alone had suffered serious damage; she wept at the havoc when she saw it in the grey light of the day, a kind of symbol bearing meanings for herself alone, and Captain Cutlass found her among the ashes guiltily regarding them, with Miss Amelia expressing the severest censure by her silence. He came in upon them whistling, exuberant.

"There's something tonic in a fire," said he; "it's as near on war as we may attain in those pampered times. We ought to have an annual one to keep us from losing the early virtues. Eh?"

The reddened eyes of Penelope stopped him; he realised an attitude of accusation in his aunt.

"I never was more ashamed of myself in all my life!" said Pen, and Aunt Amelia breathed heavily, visibly a martyr to restraint.

"Wouldn't have missed it for a hundred pounds," he told them buoyantly. "There's a

certain calling forth-a stimulus-an excitation in a fire which gives me my one regret that we can't all live in cities and see other people's fires each evening. Some pleasing terror is in conflagration, eh? You saw the fine delight of the village boys? They liked it even better than the garden-party. What the world wants when it's young is bonfires-to see the ravening beast uncaged: Chinese lanterns are all very well for timid age.

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"I can't conceive how I should have been so stupid!" lamented Pen, but little comforted by his humour.

"If people will read in bed" said Miss Amelia sardonically.

"I always do!" said Captain Cutlass. "The thing is, Pen, to avoid somnolent books for such occasions. A rapid

action! It's the hour for breathless incident, if we're to avoid the risks of burning curtains. Never mind! It is probably the first time Reggy's poems have roused intense excitement."

66

Reggy's nonsense!" said his aunt impatiently, and Pen's lips hardened.

"I think," said she, "they're very clever. They're beautifull"

"Of course they are!" said Captain Cutlass.

He had not learned as yet of the wounded forest. The morn was beat upon by tatters of the storm. Gusts eddied round the house, strewing the lawn with twigs and whistling in the chimneys; wild ragged clouds went scurrying across the sky. Rooks gathered in the fields with scoffing seagulls from the nearest port; they rose at times in the air in clanging masses. The garden had lost its tameness; every bush appeared to struggle to escape and join those elemental revels. To the relish of their meal that morning every sense contributed; they saw the boughs thrash, and the tree-tops rise and fall like billows round the village; the swollen river at its weirs resounded like a cataract; a scent of freshened earth and herbage seemed to find its way indoors, contesting with the scorched wood odours.

All things considered, they were a cheerful party; lifted a little above themselves by the night's adventure, inspirited by the morning's weather; only Pen was contrite, Miss Amelia sour. Maurice should have basked in their approval of his vigilance and gallantry, but for one who had averted tragedy unspeakable he seemed ill at ease whenever the night's events were recapitulated. Norah alone observed it.

"If you say a word," she whispered hurriedly, "I'll not forgive you!"

"Can't keep it up much

longer," he muttered. "It makes me feel an arrant humbug," and regardless of her clutch upon his arm disclosed the cause of his embarrassment. He had been credited with the first alarm; Pen's feeling of obligation, obvious in her manner to him, gave him pain. "I did the shouting," he explained, "but Norah was the first to see the fire. She roused me, you understand. I'm sorry for your knuckles, Norah."

"And I'm sorry for your stupidity," she said in an undertone of disappointment. "You have thrown away the best part of a beautiful reputation and robbed Pen of half her admiration, and you're going to make me look absurdly silly in another moment."

"And all the time we have been thinking Mr Maurice was so clever!" cried Aunt Amelia. "How did you waken, Norah?"

"I was not in bed," said Norah, looking with blameful eyes on Maurice.

"But we all retired together, to bed, hours before," said her aunt, astonished. "We had quite decided Andy would not come till morning.

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"I thought, again, he would," said Norah, very red, "and decided to wait up for him. So I returned downstairs and stayed till he appeared, a benevolence for which he has to thank me, since Fancy Farm might have been burned about his ears if I had not seen the flame from the west wing on my window-blind as I was preparing to go to bed again."

"So it's Norah you have got to thank," said Miss Amelia to Pen, whose manner to the hero had impressed itself on her as rather warm.

"At all events it was Mr Maurice who rescued me," said Pen impulsively, her aspect a defiance of Sir Andrew Schaw's theories of gratitude. He, on his part, seemed at once immersed in contemplation, with his eyes upon his cousin.

She turned uneasily to Maurice. "I hope you are glad now that I gave you the opportunity," she whispered. "You think of everything," he said to her humbly.

"My wits have been on edge for weeks; I have to think of everything; amn't I a woman? But it was not altogether to give you the joy of rescuing Pen I sent you to her door; I was afraid myself; I was afraid!"

Cattanach appeared before their breakfast ended; he brought from every part of the estate along the coast the tidings of devastation. At once Sir Andrew mounted and was off, the fire forgotten, but a vision in his mind of Norah standing in the hall to welcome him from the storm, of all the household she alone solicitous.

He had mourned the fallen comrades and returned to Clashgour Farm where his mare was stalled, when the ravage of the storm appeared of little consequence compared with that which was created in his breast by a foolish sentence from the lips of Fleming.

Together they were leaning on a dry-stone dyke before the

steading, looking upon a flooded meadow whose condition made the farmer even less urbane in manner than was his wont. To him the spoiling of the woods was of less account than the loss of a stack of hay that was now on its way to sea, swept off by the river spate. He snuffed with his ivory ladle without the usual courtesy of the proffered box, and talked of the ruined plantings as if they were a blessing in disguise.

"No' much to complain o', laird ! A windfa', a perfect windfa'! It's time thae trees were doon in ony case; noo ye can turn them into money. It's no' as if the hale jing-bang were sailin' doon the river like my stack."

"I would rather have my trees," said Captain Cutlass sadly, as he turned about to get his horse. "And misfortunes never come single; you'll have heard about the fire?"

"Yes," said Clashgour indifferently. "It's a mercy it's nae waur, and that naething happened to Miss Colquhoun to put aff the waddin'."

"The wedding!" said Sir Andrew, stopping. "What wedding?"

man

His tenant fortified himself with another snuff: a made coarse by his convivial habits, the delicacies of perception blunted, he had long since lost the instinct to refrain from a dangerous familiarity.

"Naebody should ken that better than yoursel', Sir Andrew," he replied, with a cunning leer. "The clash o' the country's sayin' she played

her cairds gey weel to nab a grandfather landlord,"

Next moment Captain Cutlass had him by the collar and shook him like a rat. "You blackguard!" he exclaimed. "To say such a thing about a lady!"

"Lord keep us, laird!" gasped Fleming, "I'm no' misca'in' her. If it comes to that, I was nabbed mysel', and I'm no' regrettin' 't."

Incapable of answer, Captain Cutlass left him. The tempest of the mind awakened thus prevailed until he reached the village. From the lips of Norah the hint that Pen's tuition had occasioned chatter, though enough to make him bitterly regret his scheme, was not so overwhelming as this brutal revelation. Pen was more the victim of his whim than he had first imagined. . . . And Norah had waited up for himthe home personified, the soul of the hearth; that dream he had one time told her of, revived by her living presence when he came from the storm into the warm-lit hall. . . . Brave Pen! Honest Pen in all respects so close upon his own conception of the perfect woman, how must he atone for the consequences of his folly? His errant His errant sense of honour promptly gave an

answer.

If Mr Birrell was capable of surprise at any act of Captain Cutlass, he had occasion when his client, having trotted up to the office door a little later, fastened his mare to a ring worn thin by his litigious

before James

Birrell was born, and burst into the writing-chamber with the question, "Mr Birrell, am I well enough off to marry?"

The Writer, who had seen him earlier in the day in the huddle of Fancy Farm with his mind preoccupied with other things than matrimony, thrust his glasses back upon his forehead, peered at him under shaggy eyebrows, rubbed his hands, and gave a pawky smile, in which were blended pity, fellow-feeling, and amusement.

"It's a point that didna bother you much last year, Sir Andrew, when the topic was discussed between us in this very room," he answered. "I'm glad that such a humdrum commonplace consideration has occurred to you at last. Famous, man, famous ! You see romance itsel' must come back at last to a question o' bawbees. If you had half as much interest in your own pecuniary affairs as Miss Grant has gotten, you would know that Schawfield was never in a better state to warrant such a step as you suggest. I thank the Lord for Athabascas! And now I hear the very winds are blawin' in your favour. What's the good o' me keepin' books if you'll no' take the trouble to understand them?"

He moved to a deed-box stamped in gilded letters with the name of the estate.

"For Heaven's sake don't go into that again!" said his client hastily, pushing the deed

box back on its rack with a it's women who make the thrust of his riding-crop. "This matches." thing ought to be in the family mausoleum. Full of ghosts, man, full of ghosts! All I want to-day is an assurance from my man of business that I'm not insolvent. I have the utmost confidence in your judgment."

The Writer sighed and sat down again. "And yet folk wonder at defaulting lawyers!" he remarked. "My trade exists on the presumption that the world's dishonest, and that every man's a rogue unless his name is on a parchment, stamped, and yet you'll put such confidence in a lawyer that you'll never fash yourself to check his documents. It's a marvellous compliment to my profession, but whiles I can't deny to myself that it's idiotic."

"I'll risk it," said Captain Cutlass.

"Yes, yes! you'll risk it! You'll risk anything, Sir Andrew-that's the worst o' you! But it's no' a way that's justified by reason, Mr Birrell

insisted.

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James Birrell chuckled. "And what for no'?" he asked in the homely idiom. "It's no disgrace to the man that he should come like the mavis from the tree to his natural charmer. And am I to congratulate you, Sir Andrew?" "That remains to be seen," said the baronet. "I have yet to consult the lady."

His old friend smiled again and looked at him with a father's eye. "It's almost necessary," he remarked with irony. "Just pro forma, you understand. Pro forma!"

"I'm not so sure," said his olient. "It's a point that's extremely doubtful, to judge from the lady's lady's manner," and again James Birrell chuckled.

"I'm up in years," he said, "and I've just been an observer, taking no share in the game mysel', but I always understood that coyness was a part of it. Hoots, man! get awa' wi'ye!"

Sir Andrew walked about the room restlessly, surprised in some degree at his agent's sympathetic humour. "A year ago you would have called the project sheer romantics," he remarked.

"A year ago your mood was not so sensible: you were then for training fish to swim tail foremost."

"Not a word about that presumptuous folly!" said Sir Andrew. "It's a painful subject. I find it has not escaped the observation and the com

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