however telling her what followed.  For something to his advantage did follow, and it was greatly to the credit of Miss Ailie and Miss Kitty, though they went about it as timidly as if they were participating in a crime.  Ever since they learned of the sin which had brought this man into the world their lives had been saddened, for on the same day they realized what a secret sorrow had long lain at their mother’s heart.  Alison Sibbald was a very simple, gracious lady, who never recovered from the shock of discovering that she had married a libertine; yet she had pressed her husband to do something for his son, and been greatly pained when he refused with a coarse laugh.  The daughters were very like her in nature, and though the knowledge of what she had suffered increased many fold their love for her, so that in her last days their passionate devotion to her was the talk of Redlintie, it did not blind them to what seemed to them to be their duty to the man.  As their father’s son, they held, he had a right to a third of the gauger’s money, and to withhold it from him, now that they knew his whereabouts, would have been a form of theft.  But how to give T. his third?  They called him T. from delicacy, and they had never spoken to him.  When he passed them in the streets, they turned pale, and, thinking of their mother, looked another way.  But they knew he winked.

At last, looking red in one street, and white in another, but resolute in all, they took their business to the office of Mr. John McLean, the writer, who had once escorted Miss Kitty home from a party without anything coming of it, so that it was quite a psychological novel in several volumes.  Now Mr. John happened to be away at the fishing, and a reckless maid showed them into the presence of a strange man, who was no other than his brother Ivie, home for a year’s holiday from India, and naturally this extraordinary occurrence so agitated them that Miss Ailie had told half her story before she realized that Miss Kitty was titting at her dress.  Then indeed she sought to withdraw, but Ivie, with the alarming yet not unpleasing audacity of his sex, said he had heard enough to convince him that in this matter he was qualified to take his brother’s place.  But he was not, for he announced, “My advice to you is not to give T. a halfpenny,” which showed that he did not even understand what they had come about.

They begged permission to talk to each other behind the door, and presently returned, troubled but brave.  Miss Kitty whispered “Courage!” and this helped Miss Ailie to the deed.

“We have quite made up our minds to let T. have the money,” she said, “but—­but the difficulty is the taking it to him.  Must we take it in person?”

“Why not?” asked Ivie, bewildered.

“It would be such a painful meeting to us.” said Miss Ailie.

“And to him,” added simple Miss Kitty.

“You see we have thought it best not to—­not to know him,” said Miss Ailie, faintly.