in listening to this old lawyer explaining to the stout lady that the family affairs were grievously involved?  He was still intently watching the new-comers who straggled in, singly or in pairs, to the stalls.  When a slight motion of the white curtains showed that some one was entering one of the boxes, the corner of the box was regarded with as earnest a gaze as ever followed the movements of a herd of red deer in the misty chasms of Ben-an-Sloich.  What concern had he in the troubles of this over-dressed and stout lady, who was bewailing her misfortunes and wringing her bejewelled hands?

Suddenly his heart seemed to stand still altogether.  It was a light, glad laugh—­the sound of a voice he knew—­that seemed to have pierced him as with a rifle-ball; and at the same moment from the green shimmer of foliage in the balcony there stepped into the glare of the hall a young girl with life, and laughter, and a merry carelessness in her face and eyes.  She threw her arms around her mother’s neck and kissed her.  She bowed to the legal person.  She flung her garden hat on to a couch, and got up on a chair to get fresh seed put in for her canary.  It was all done so simply, and naturally, and gracefully that in an instant a fire of life and reality sprang into the whole of this sham thing.  The woman was no longer a marionette, but the anguish-stricken mother of this gay and heedless girl.  And when the daughter jumped down from the chair again—­her canary on her finger—­and when she came forward to pet, and caress, and remonstrate with her mother, and when the glare of the lights flashed on the merry eyes, and on the white teeth and laughing lips, there was no longer any doubt possible.  Macleod’s face was quite pale.  He took the programme from Ogilvie’s hand, and for a minute or two stared mechanically at the name of Miss Gertrude White, printed on the pink-tinted paper.  He gave it him back without a word.  Ogilvie only smiled; he was proud of the surprise he had planned.

And now the fancies and recollections that came rushing into Macleod’s head were of a sufficiently chaotic and bewildering character.  He tried to separate that grave, and gentle, and sensitive girl he had met at Prince’s Gate from this gay madcap, and he could not at all succeed.  His heart laughed with the laughter of this wild creature; he enjoyed the discomfiture and despair of the old lawyer as she stood before him twirling her garden hat by a solitary ribbon; and when the small, white fingers raised the canary to be kissed by the pouting lips, the action was more graceful than anything he had ever seen in the world.  But where was the silent and serious girl who had listened with such rapt attention to his tales of passion and revenge, who seemed to have some mysterious longing for those gloomy shores he came from, who had sung with such exquisite pathos “A wee bird cam’ to our ha’ door?” Her cheek had turned white when she heard of the fate of the son of Maclean:  surely that sensitive and vivid imagination could not belong to this audacious girl, with her laughing, and teasings, and demure coquetry?