We had no father,—­Margray, or Effie, or Mary Strathsay, or I. He had brought his wife out from their home in Scotland to St. Anne’s in the Provinces, and had died or ever I was born,—­and I was the last of the weans.  A high, keen spirit was his wife; she did not bend or break; a stroke that would have beggared another took no crumb from her cloth; she let the right in warehouses and wharves lie by, and lie by, and each year it paid her sterling income.  None ever saw tear in those proud eyes of hers, when they brought in her husband dead, or when they carried him out; but every day at noon she went up into her own room, and whether she slept or whether she waked the two hours in that darkened place, there was not so much as a fly that sang in the pane to tell.

She was a fair, stately woman, taller than any of her girls, and with half the mind to hate them all because they were none of them a son.  More or less the three were like her, lofty brows and shining hair and skin like morning light, the lave of them,—­but as for me, I was my father’s child.  There’s a portrait of him now, hangs on the chimney-pier:  a slight man, and not tall,—­the dark hair waves away on either side the low, clear brow,—­the eyes deep-set, and large and dark and starry,—­a carmine just flushing beneath the olive of the cheek,—­the fine firm mouth just breaking into smiles; and I remember that that morning when I set sail for Edinboro’, as I turned away from gazing on that face, and saw myself glinting like a painted ghost in the long dim mirror beside me, I said it indeed, and proudly, that I was my father’s own child.

So she kissed us, Effie and me.  Perhaps mine lingered the longer, for the color in my cheek was deeper tinct than Scotch, it was the wild bit of Southern blood that had run in her love’s veins; when she looked at me, I gave her back hot phases of her passionate youth again,—­so perhaps mine was the kiss that left the deeper dint.

Margray, and Mary Strathsay, had been back three years from school, and the one was just married,—­and if she left her heart out of the bargain, what was that to me?—­and the other was to reign at home awhile ere the fated Prince should come, and Effie and myself were to go over seas and take their old desks in the famous school at Edinboro’.  The mother knew that she must marry her girls well, and we two younglings were sadly in Queen Mary Strathsay’s way.  Yes, Mrs. Strathsay lived for nought but the making of great matches for her girls; the grandees of the Provinces to-day sat down at her board and to-morrow were to pay her tribute, scot and lot; four great weddings she meant should one by one light up her hearth and leave it lonely with the ashes there.  But of them all she counted on the last, the best, the noblest for Alice,—­that was I.

Old Johnny Graeme was the partner in what had been my father’s house, and for fifteen years it had gone prospering as never house did yet, and making Mrs. Strathsay bitterer; and Johnny Graeme, a little wizened warlock, had never once stopped work long enough to play at play and reckon his untold gold.