What he saw in her she could not tell.  He seemed determined to rest wholly in the present, and take out of it all the peace and pleasantness that he could.  In the old days, when the Dalziel boys were naughty, and Mrs. Dalziel tiresome; and work was hard, and holidays were few, and life was altogether the rough road that it often seems to the young, he had once called her “Pleasantness and Peace.”  He never said so now; but sometimes he looked it.

Many an evening he came and sat by her fireside, in the arm-chair, which seemed by right to have devolved upon him; never staying very long, for he was still nervously sensitive about being “in the way,” but making himself and them all very cheerful and happy while he did stay.  Only sometimes, when Fortune’s eyes stole to his face—­not a young man’s face now—­she fancied she could trace, besides the wrinkles, a sadness, approaching to hardness, that never used to be.  But again, when interested in some book or other (he said it was delicious to take to reading again, after the long fast of years), he would look around to her for sympathy, or utter one of his dry drolleries, the old likeness, the old manner and tone would come back so vividly that she started, hardly knowing whether the feeling it gave her was pleasure or pain.

But beneath both, lying so deep down that neither he nor any one could ever suspect its presence, was something else.  Can many waters quench love?  Can the deep sea drown it?  What years of silence can wither it?  What frost of age can freeze it down?  God only knows.

Hers was not like a girl’s love.  Those two girls sitting by her day after day would have smiled at it, and at its object.  Between themselves they considered Mr. Roy somewhat of an “old fogy;” were very glad to make use of him now and then, in the great dearth of gentlemen at St. Andrews, and equally glad afterward to turn him over to Auntie, who was always kind to him.  Auntie was so kind to every body.

Kind?  Of course she was, and above all when he looked worn and tired.  He did so sometimes:  as if life had ceased to be all pleasure, and the constant mirth of these young folks was just a little too much for him.  Then she ingeniously used to save him from it and them for a while.  They never knew—­there was no need for them to know—­how tenfold deeper than all the passion of youth is the tenderness with which a woman cleaves to the man she loves when she sees him growing old.

Thus the days went by till Easter came, announced by the sudden apparition, one evening, of David Dalziel.

That young man, when, the very first day of his holidays, he walked in upon his friends at St. Andrews, and found sitting at their tea-table a strange gentleman, did not like it at all—­scarcely even when he found out that the intruder was his old friend, Mr. Roy.

“And you never told me a word about this,” said he, reproachfully, to Miss Williams.  “Indeed, you have not written to me for weeks; you have forgotten all about me.”