parently wicked that they could not deceive a kitten, and everything ends in joy. Real life is not like that, but it ought to be. That's why common people-like myself-read common novels. They get quite enough of real life by living it."

Sir Andrew listened with amusement, but brought back the conversation to the subject of its opening. "Most of the satisfaction of wealth, I'm told, is in the power it gives over other people," he remarked. "As your guests here, we can be so only on your own terms. Remember you are absolute monarch."

"Then," said Penelope quickly, "I am not going to encourage those gipsies who come about the place. Every tribe that comes into the parish looks upon this as an almshouse."

"There's nothing in it!" he protested. "To give them a bone occasionally is surely not wrong; why, it's actually biblical!"

"I have

Penelope was firm. convictions," she insisted. "And I'm taking you at your word. And there should be no excuses for men like Paterson. If he had not been encouraged by you he might have been an honest workman, whose wife could go to bed at night with an easy mind. I don't believe in countenancing vagabonds."

"I always loved a vagabond," said Captain Cutlass; "I don't know why."

"So do I, sometimes, but they are a luxury Paterson's wife can't very well afford, and

she has told me all about him. Is the estate all mine?" "Certainly."

"Then I insist on Mr Cattanach taking a firmer hand with those farmers at Braleckan; they are shamefully neglecting their dykes and hedges. When it was not my estate"-she laughed-"I thought it very picturesque, but now I have to think of my successors, and hand Schawfield down to them in as good condition as when I got it. I think I'll plant the whole braeface behind the mill with timber."

"Haven't the money, Pen; haven't the gelt !" said Captain Cutlass, shaking his head.

"Yes, you have-in that diamond mine that paid a dividend the other day for the first time," broke in Norah eagerly. "Now's the time to sell out of it, plant trees, as Pen proposes, and watch them grow. Diamonds! remember, Andy; you can't have shares in a diamond mine and hold the views you do on diamonds with any consistency."

He threw up his hands in a gesture of surrender.

"There is another thing," said Penelope, bracing herself to a greater effort. "I think everyone should earn his or her living somehow, and-

"Why, Pen! I do, surely. It takes a good deal of my time to qualify the excessive zeal of Mr Cattanach, and keep an eye on my cattle."

"You do, Sir Andrew, and I'll-I'll allow you a modest salary. So does Norah; so do I, but-but Mr Maurice" She broke down here, appar

ently appalled at her own temerity.

Maurice reddened, her thought had come to him even before she gave it halting expression. "There's the new book, you know," he suggested, with a smile, and his good-humour restored her courage.

"I am speaking of real work," said Pen. "Work people want. Does one make a living from poetry?"

"Harebell and Honey' cost me exactly £70 to publish," he informed her. "If I made anything off poetry I should be sure there was something very far wrong with it.”

"Then," she pursued, with relentless logic, "you don't even pretend to try to earn your living?"

"I don't," he admitted quite amiably. "I take a remote half-yearly interest in a business established more than half a century ago by my people, and it seems to prosper very agreeably in my absence. You have heard of the shipbuilders Maurice?"

A delighted smile irradiated Pen's face. "Oh!" she exclaimed, "I didn't know you were a shipbuilder. That makes a difference. But if I were a shipbuilder, I would think it so splendidly poetical that I would never dream of bothering with make-believe poetry at all. I thought you did nothing else!"

Maurice flushed a little under the mildly satiric eye of Norah; in truth, he practically did nothing else.

Pen would have ceased to be queen regent for the farceur in a week were it not for Norah's ingenuity and delight in thinking out a hundred ways in which the pleasantry might confer some benefit either on Sir Andrew or on Schawfield. The two of them conspired with Justice (truer friend to the world than Tolerance, Sir Andrew's favourite); in a fortnight they had, between them, established a régime in Fancy Farm where all things went like clockwork, and where fads were stringently discouraged. Aunt Amelia couldn't understand it: "I'm sure that Andy's going to be ill," she wailed, "he grows so sensible." Indeed he played his part in the joke with honesty; smoth

ering many an inspiration which would make the prank more laughably ingenious, relinquishing that moral domination which is sometimes found in the tenderest men; for the nonce a pattern of conformity and regular ways.

Norah, abandoned by her aunt to the vulgar claims upon manorial ladies, induced Penelope to go with her one day among the tenements, while Miss Amelia swept magnificently away on more stately social rounds, of which she compassed many in the first few weeks of her barouche. They even defied the gander: "Get away, you stupid goose!" cried the fearless Pen, contemptuously; the savage wynds revealed themselves as after all

hum-drumly like to other places where the mission flag of Miss Amelia waved: the the native tribes proved friendly. Watty Fraser, coaxed from his shyness, played them "Clean Pease Straw" and "The Smith's a Gallant Fireman," to show from what celestial heights Italian music had degenerated. "They havena the snap, them foreign fellows, and the snap's the main thing. I canna stand them gliding capers." "And quite right too!" said Pen; "the snap goes best with the Scottish climate." "Stop, you!" said Watty, screwing up a peg, "and I will give you a splendid one of my own contrivance! I was thinking for to call it Lady Norah'" -whereon that lady blushed tremendously, and Pen was very sly.

Norah sat amazed at the art with which her friend set people at their ease.

'Twas

not an art, in truth, but an effluence from an artless nature that disarmed suspicion and dispelled alarms by sheer simplicity. Pen, above all, could restrain the roving, curious eye that breeds dislike in humble dwellings, and be oblivious to dirty jaw-boxes and-in Paterson's-to pots of salmon-roe, at which Sir Andrew always laughed as a harmless superstition of illicit anglers. She would lean, to the manner born, on counters, marvellously learned in unbleached cottons and the cost of remnant woollens; sheep-dips, saddlery, potatoes, smoothing-irons, cheap baker's "dumpies"; loin, hough, and entrails; or balance on a kitchen dresser, telling all

about herself and her sisters in the manse, showing herself most humorously experienced in economic household makeshifts, hard times, the makingdown of garments, old-fashioned eures, half superstitious, for children's ailments. In half an hour she could be further into the confidence of the folk than Aunt Amelia could have been in a hundred years, and all without a single conscious effort.

"How do you do it?" Norah asked her enviously. "I have never seen that woman SO genial and unreserved before."

"Have you not?" said Pen, surprised. "She seemed to me very natural."

"I don't know how it is, but they trust you," said Norah. "With us-with Aunt Amelia and me-there's always some aloofness, some acting of a part. They speak to you in a different accent almost."

"Perhaps you unconsciously act a part to them," suggested Pen. "There's nothing they discover sooner. I have no necessity to seem but what I am with them; I know them, and I like them; they remind me of my mother. She had been a servant-maid when my father met her first-one of the class to whom rich people leave the beautiful art of domesticity, the first, the highest. It was sometimes pretty tight with us in the manse; you have no idea of the grandeur and hospitality expected off a stipend less than a blacksmith's earnings! But my mother pulled us through. Father philosophised, but she did better; she turned garments outside

in.

She didn't know much about poetry, except the Psalms and a song or two. She taught us to love the humble, though I'm not a bit humble myself, and prefer the shy and quiet, though I happen to be neither. I learned from Miss Skene how stupidly the rich may think about the poor, who have sentiment and pride, and many compensations, just like other people. The one thing you must never do is to pity them."

"Surely for what they miss of beauty in the world?" said Norah.

"Lord bless me, no!" cried Pen. "Not that! Do you imagine God's unfair? Do you think all the sweetness of the world, the hopes, dreams, gaiety, are only for the wellto-do? There's not a tinker on the road but has his moment. 'People like you,' I told Miss Skene once, 'never really see the poor, but only yourselves in the places of the poor. You credit them with privations and discontents you would feel yourself in their position. They're really just about as happy as yourself. And at times as sad. Their real sufferings you are not likely to hear anything at all about."

"Then we should leave them as they are?" said Norah, cunningly political.

"No," said Pen. "You can't. They can no more remain what they are than you can; they must move. They don't want pity, which is often quite misplaced, but you, to be really happy, must be generous to them. No, not generous, I

mean just. Whether they're at their ease with you or not depends upon yourself. I know, because my people have been always sharing trouble, and fun, and soup with people I can never look upon but with affection. Most folk change their friends when they change their clothes. If they rise in the world they can find a thousand very plausible reasons for throwing off their old acquaintances. I hope I should never do that. I like to make new friends, but I'd rather not make them at all if it meant I was to turn my back on old ones. I hope that if I came into a great fortune to-morrow I should feel none the less at home in a but-and-ben."

"I'm sure there's not the slightest fear of it," said Norah warmly. "You have as great a genius for fidelity as Andy. It extends even to some trivial songs which I'm sure you can only tolerate because you knew them when a child."

Pen laughed. "That's so!' she admitted. "Ought I to turn my back on them now that you have taught me to love Schubert 'and them gliding capers'? The trivial songs are not trivial to me at all; they bring back the past like a perfume, and they let me play again with a little girl who was Penelope Colquhoun."

"Another phase of the pathetic fallacy!" said Norah mischievously.

"What's that?" asked Pen, who was never ashamed to show her ignorance.

"You should never bring your own joys or your own griefs to the appreciation of

nature or art; they should be loved for themselves alone."

"Good gracious, that seems awful nonsense! One can't love anything for itself alone. Even a baby likes the daylight just because its brains recall the dark. I defy you to look at anything or listen to any song in that inhuman abstract way. Everything is shaped by our experience. A song has two tunes one that was made by the composer, another you make for yourself, that has no notes to it, but is full of sad or happy things remembered, which nobody could understand except yourself."

Penelope did not require to have authority as Mistress of the Keys to find her way to the homes in Schawfield village; long before that prank had come to the freakish brain of Captain Cutlass she had made acquaintance with the people in the shops and in the fields and at the wells, where they emptied stoups and waited to fill them up again for the chance of a palaver. And wherever there was a child she knew the passport to its mother's hearth if she had wanted there. But there were no bairnsmore's the pity in the house of Mr Bir rell, and as yet she had not drunk from the Pekin teapot. Norah baulked at an introduction there, doubtless for private

reasons.

Pen suddenly suspected something of the kind, and as usual did not beat about the bush. "I'd like to meet Miss Birrell," she said; "she seems to be the one outstanding female personality in Schaw

field. It's always her the other women quote. Can't we call on her this afternoon?"

"Of course," said Norah. "You'd have met her long ago if you hadn't your Radical scruples about going round in state with Aunt Amelia. I'm certain that she's dying to make your acquaintance, for she doesn't say so. And you must be sure to like her teapot."

"If I do, I'll say so," answered Pen. "If I don't, I can praise her tea at least, for there I'm not particular if it happens to be reasonably

warm."

The day was sultry, and the world lay panting all the fervent afternoon. A landrail in the field behind the village kept continuously craik-craiking, like a salmon reel-voice, it might seem, of the parched earth; no other note was audible. Jock Fraser waddled from his post and sought the Midtown Burn, now withered in its courses, stood in the surviving tiny pools and cooled his scaly legs. Across the street skipped Wyse the saddler, from the licensed grocer's, dangling a bottle, frank and honest, from a string about its neck, suggesting oil, but really the receptacle for beer, good cooling beer. A street of windows with the blinds all down: happy the people in the massive, vault-like lower dwellings of the tenements and wynds!

Miss Birrell welcomed her

visitors with effusion, in a room that won its way at once to the heart of Pen, with its dark mahogany, its shining cupboards, and and its flowery