“Miss Jean, won’t you sing us a song?  I’m convinced that you sing Scots songs quite perfectly.”

Jean laughed.  “I can sing Scots songs in a way, but I have a voice about as big as a sparrow’s.  If it would amuse you I’ll try.”

So Jean sat down to the piano and sang “Proud Maisie,” and “Colin’s Cattle,” and one or two other old songs.

“I wonder,” said Peter Reid, “if you know a song my mother used to sing—­’Strathairlie’?”

“Indeed I do.  It’s one I like very much.  I have it here in this little book.”  She struck a few simple chords and began to sing:  it was a lilting, haunting tune, and the words were “old and plain.”

   “O, the lift is high and blue,
    And the new mune glints through,
  On the bonnie corn-fields o’ Strathairlie;
    Ma ship’s in Largo Bay,
    And I ken weel the way
  Up the steep, steep banks o’ Strathairlie.

    When I sailed ower the sea,
    A laddie bold and free,
  The corn sprang green on Strathairlie! 
    When I come back again,
    It’s an auld man walks his lane
  Slow and sad ower the fields o’ Strathairlie.

    O’ the shearers that I see
    No’ a body kens me,
  Though I kent them a’ in Strathairlie;
    An’ the fisher-wife I pass,
    Can she be the braw lass
  I kissed at the back o’ Strathairlie? 
  O, the land is fine, fine,
    I could buy it a’ for mine,
  For ma gowd’s as the stooks in Strathairlie;
    But I fain the lad would be
    Wha sailed ower the saut sea
  When the dawn rose grey on Strathairlie.”

Jean rose from the piano.  Jock had got out his books and had begun his lessons.  Mhor and Peter were under the table playing at being cave-men.  Pamela was stitching at her embroidery.  Peter Reid sat shading his eyes from the light with his hand.

Jean knelt down on the rug and held out her hands to the blazing fire.

“It must be sad to be old and rich,” she said softly, almost as if she were speaking to herself.  “It is so very certain that we can carry nothing out of this world....  I read somewhere of a man who, on every birthday, gave away some of his possessions so that at the end he might not be cumbered and weighted with them.”  She looked up and caught the gaze of Peter Reid fixed on her intently.  “It’s rather a nice idea, don’t you think, to give away all the superfluous money and lands, pictures and jewels, everything we have, and stand stripped, as it were, ready when we get the word to come, to leap into the beyond?”

Pamela spoke first.  “There speaks sweet and twenty,” she said.

“Yes,” said Jean.  “I know it’s quite easy for me to speak in that lordly way of disposing of possessions, for I haven’t got any to dispose of.”

“Then,” said Pamela, “we are to take it that you are ready to spring across any minute?”

“So far as goods and gear go; but I’m rich in other things.  I’m pretty heavily weighted by David, and Jock, and Mhor.”