The gentlemen, too, were tolerably comfortable together. Both
Alister and Ian had plenty of talk and anecdote. The latter pleased
the ladies with descriptions of northern ways and dresses and
manners--perhaps yet more with what pleased the men also, tales of
wolf-and bear-shooting. But it seemed odd that, when the talk
turned upon the home-shooting called sport, both Alister and Ian
should sit in unsmiling silence.

There was in Ian a certain playfulness, a subdued merriment, which
made Mercy doubt her ears after his seriousness of the night before.
Life seemed to flash from him on all sides, occasionally in a keen
stroke of wit, oftener in a humorous presentation of things. His
brother alone could see how he would check the witticism on his very
lips lest it should hurt. It was in virtue of his tenderness toward
everything that had life that he was able to give such narratives
of what he had seen, such descriptions of persons he had met. When
he told a story, it was with such quiet participation, manifest in
the gleam of his gray eyes, in the smile that hovered like the very
soul of Psyche about his lips, that his hearers enjoyed the telling
more than the tale. Even the chief listened with eagerness to every
word that fell from his brother.

The ladies took note that, while the manners of the laird and his
mother were in a measure old-fashioned, those of Ian were of the
latest: with social custom, in its flow of change, he seemed at
home. But his ease never for a moment degenerated into the
free-and-easy, the dry rot of manners; there was a stateliness in
him that dominated the ease, and a courtesy that would not permit
frendliness to fall into premature familiarity. He was at ease with