about the men he is with.  It is good for him to be made to leave his work, and play games; he is keen about his footer and they think he will row well!  The man who has rooms on the same staircase seems a very good sort.  I forget who he is—­it’s quite a well-known family—­but he has been uncommonly kind to Davie.  He wants him to go home with him next week, but of course Davie is keen to get back to Priorsford.  Besides, you can’t visit the stately homes of England on thirty shillings, and that’s about Davie’s limit, dear lamb!  Jock and Mhor are looking forward with joy to hear him speak.  They expect his accent to have suffered an Oxford change, and Jock doesn’t think he will be able to remain in the room with him and not laugh.”

“I expect Jock will be ‘affronted,’” said Pamela.  “But you aren’t the only one who is expecting a brother, Jean, girl.  Any moment I may hear that Biddy is in London.  He wired from Port Said that he would come straight to Priorsford.  I wonder whether I should take rooms for him in the Hydro, or in one of these nice old hotels in the Nethergate?  I wish I could crush him into Hillview, but there isn’t any room, alas!”

“I wish,” said Jean, and stopped.  She had wanted in her hospitable way to say that Pamela’s brother must come to The Rigs, but she checked the impulse with a fear that it was an absurd proposal.  She was immensely interested in this brother of Pamela’s.  All she had heard of him appealed to her imagination, for Jean, cumbered as she was with domestic cares, had an adventurous spirit, and thrilled to hear of the perils of the mountains, the treks behind the ranges for something hidden, all the daring escapades of an adventure-loving young man with time and money at his disposal.  She had made a hero of Pamela’s “Biddy,” but now that she was to see him she shrank from the meeting.  Suppose he were a supercilious sort of person who would be bored with the little town and the people in it.  And the fact that he had a title complicated matters, Jean thought.  She could not imagine herself talking naturally to Lord Bidborough.  Besides, she thought, she didn’t know in the least how to talk to men; she so seldom met any.

“I expect,” she broke out after a silence, “your brother will take you away?”

“For Christmas, I think,” said Pamela, “but I shall come back again.  Do you realise that I’ve been here two months, Jean?”

“Does it seem so short to you?”

“In a way it does; the days have passed so pleasantly.  And yet I seem to have been here all my life; I feel so much a part of Priorsford, so akin to the people in it.  It must be the Border blood in my veins.  My mother loved her own country dearly.  I have heard my aunt say that she never felt at home at Bidborough or Mintern Abbas.  I am sure she would have wanted us to know her Scots home, so Biddy and I are going to Champertoun for Christmas.  My mother had no brothers, and everything went to a distant cousin.  He and his wife seem friendly people and they urge us to visit them.”