on me, Madge, everybody abuses me, and thinks me a selfish old beast, who won't let you leave him; whereas you know, my darling, it would be the proudest day of my life on which I gave you away to some nice fellow. I must say I should like him to be a Scotchman though, but that shall be just as you like, my pet," Mr. Fraser would add hastily, lest Madge's decision might be influenced, as it always was, by his lightest wish.

One evening at Lough Shellach I took up a little portrait, a vignette photograph, of Miss Fraser, which had been done at Naples. In some respects it was perfect; the pose of the head, the beautiful expression even of the eyes, were faithfully reproduced, and yet it was not a likeness any one who loved Madge would wish to possess.

"It is like her," I said to my hostess, "and yet it is very unsatisfactory; what is wrong with the picture?

"Ah! you don't know Marjory's face so well as we do," answered that lady, "or you would see directly where the fault lies, but it is exactly like nature. Have you never noticed when Marjory is quite silent and thoughtful how very, very sad and drooping the lines around her mouth become? One does not observe it so much in real life, but

this photograph is exactly like Marjory as I have seen her sometimes in church (kirk was what she really called it), or listening to music, or sitting silently looking at a beautiful view."

Of course this hint was quite enough for me. "Then there is an unfortunate attachment after all," I thought, and immediately inaugurated a series of artful and apparently innocent inquiries which were unhesitatingly answered, and from which I gathered that Marjory had always been observed to look sad unless she were talking or laughing.

"Yes, ever since I can remember her, and that is about twenty years ago. She was just recovering from a low fever when we first came here. She had caught cold at the beginning of that winter, and they were very anxious about her, I remember, for some months. She was growing fast, and looked very delicate. She certainly was not nearly so pretty, so lovely I mean, as she is now, but the first thing I observed in her face was that sad droop of the mouth if it was silent. In those days of course she was more reserved and less taken notice of than is the case now; therefore, the mournful expression has always been there, and never quite outgrown."

So you see I was no wiser at the end of my long, delightful, autumn holiday than I had been at its commencement. At last I grew reconciled to the wonder of Madge's hard-heartedness, and agreed with my hostess, who used to say

"I am tempted to hope that Marjory Fraser will never marry now, for what should we do without our standard subject of speculation and of interest? Some day I will write a book entirely on the theories which I have heard advanced about her and her affairs, poor girl. The most romantic, the most idiotic, the most plausible reasons have been assigned for her resolution, and after all I believe it is simply because she has never seen anyone whom she prefers to her father. Dear old man! I don't wonder at Madge being so fond of him.”

THE Highland year appears to me to consist of only two seasons autumn and winter. The summer is not really summer at all, for there are not three evenings in either June or July when a fire is unacceptable, and as for spring, the less said about that the better. But then on the other hand, a Scotch winter is much more to my taste than the corresponding English season; at all events, one knows what one is about, and there are none of those death-giving changes and chances— one day mild and the next, a hard frost-which victimize us in the south. The individual does not however exist, who, having once spent a fine autumn in the real Highlands (even on the west-coast, if he does not mind rain), is not haunted all his life long by pleasant memories of happy days,

and a burning desire to go north again, "When the bloom is on the rye."

Such was my case I know; and year after year I shook the dust of cities from off my weary feet early in August, and turned a joyful face towards the "Noble northern land." Sometimes I went west, and sometimes east; oftenest westwards, for there lay Loch Shellach, and near Loch Shellach lay Glenthorne, and Glenthorne held Marjory Fraser.

I used often to reproach the kindly chieftainess of Loch Shellach for the unvarying silence she preserved in her letters about our beautiful Madge, but she used to defend herself by saying

"No, I will not tell you anything about her when I write; I choose that it shall all be fresh and new to you when you come to see us. Marjory Fraser is the great interest of the place, and I am not going to lose the advantage of having something new for you instead of recurring to an old subject; besides, I had nothing to say. All goes on the same at Glenthorne, Mrs. Fraser has been ill, and Madge was kept at home a good deal after you left us last year. It happened to be just that gay time I told you of at Christmas, when Mr. Munro came home and took possession of Strathmore. You remember having heard long