"Go to it to-night. You will find the walls covered with studies from
Fife. In nearly every study the same figure reappears. That is the woman
Allan loves. I am right, uncle; I feel I am."

"A fisher-girl!"

"Perhaps; but what a fisher-girl! The mother of men must have been like
her. There is one picture in which she leans against a jagged mass of
rocks, gazing over the sea. The face is so splendid, the figure so fine,
the sense of life so ample, that it haunts you. And every likeness of her
has just that tinge of melancholy which lies at the bottom of all things
that are truly happy, or truly beautiful. How could Allan care for any
other woman, having seen her?"

"You are a quick observer, Mary."

"The heart has its oracles as well as the head, uncle."

She spoke sadly, and John Campbell looked with a kindly curiosity at her.
He felt almost certain that she had suffered a keen disappointment, as
well as himself. "But she would die before she would make a complaint," he
thought, "and I may learn a lesson from her. It is a weak soul that is not
capable of its own consolation. She has evidently determined to make the
best of things beyond her sorting."

After a short silence, Mary slipped quietly from the room. John Campbell
scarcely noticed her departure. He had the heartache, and men of sixty
have it far worse than men of twenty. When their hopes fail, they have no
time left, often no ability left to renew them. To make the best of things
was all that now remained; and he was the more able to do this because of