even of confirming Ada's judgment as to the character of Dorothea Casaubon née Brooke, or as to the force of the arguments for and against the theory of evolution.

Mr. Morse had been a man with a small private income, and an intense devotion to literature. Early in his wedded life he had bought the Aviary near Glenlow, and settled down there to read and to write reviews. He had done nothing else. Death whispered to him from the Scotch mountains in a shrill, cold wind, and he passed beyond the mountains and beyond the stars, fading into the Infinite, ere any one of his numberless projects for making the world more at one with that Infinite had been carried out. To his wife and daughter he left the Aviary, some £500 a year, and the memory of a nature almost womanly in its tenderness and refinement.

So, only the three women lived in the Aviary, and Mrs and Miss Morse visited but little in Glenlow. Their house was at some distance from the village, and the people dwelling in Glenlow were hardly congenial companions, either as to social position or as to intellectual capacity. Scattered about on the hills and in the woods were some half-dozen families of their own standing in life, and to these stately visits were paid at regular intervals. Nothing more, for Mrs. Morse was an invalid, and Ada cared for none of the people around her. They did not understand her. They thought her odd. She did not understand them. She thought them stupid.

There was only one girl of her own age who at all felt with her an old companion at Miss De Portment's, who had had more to do with Ada's waking up to thought than either she or Ada was quite conscious of. The friendship between the two was close, and twice a-year Mary Nisbet journeyed northwards from her lowland home to live for some weeks in a happy dreamland of fair sights and sweet imaginative talk with Ada Morse. While the two were together they wove for

themselves a little world of thought and action, fanciful, unreal, beautiful as the Utopia of girls of seventeen should be. While they were asunder the writing of long, long letters of no ordinary school-girl type took up, not unprofitably, much of their time. Neither across their dream-world, nor across their thoughts, as they wrote one to the other, was there, as yet, the flash of the wings of the god of love-no, nor of his thousand and one imitators. You see they were not ordinary young ladies.

Ada's life was calm enough-would have been voted monotonous by some. She was always out in the woods before breakfast with the dew and the early morn. To breakfast she returned with most unfashionable appetite. After that solitary meal, Mrs. Morse, being too weak to come down and get strength in the morning air, Ada would settle down to some four hours' steady reading. Reading of no ordinary kind. She read books to understand them, if she could, not to get through them. Hence was her reading largely recapitulation, and no work was put aside until an analysis had been made of it, for she held that no writer's ideas become part of the reader's consciousness until they have been re-expressed in words of the reader's own. Then lunch with the mother, and, after that, an hour or more devoted to that good lady in the form of reading aloud that which is the whole library of most people-the newspaper. Mrs. Morse liked to know what nations were killing one another, and which of the multitudinous "tamed vipers" had his head above his fellows, and was Prime Minister, or some other hero of five minutes. Ada also believed that a knowledge of what the majority understood and thought of was needful for the due comprehension of the ideas of the glorious minority. When Mrs. Morse, wearied with wars and rumours of wars, went to sleep, Ada would steal out with a book for companion, and read in the open air,

which is the best place for reading, if the weather is at all agreeable, for then Nature and Art, the Unknowable and Man, sunlight, the scent of flowers, the singing of birds, blend into one mysterious whole, with the musical words and harmonious soul-stirring thoughts of great men and women. After dinner she would play to her mother, who liked the sound of the music, while the daughter was feeling after the deep inner meaning that she fancied, rightly or wrongly, lay in the mere crotchets and quavers. A sonata of Beethoven's was to her an expression in tone of phase after phase of human emotion. Each movement was to her a concord and succession of sweet sounds, telling of the passing of a giant mind from thought to thought. She would build up a history of the state of the poet-musician's sufferings and joys as he wrote these notes and counted these bars, a story, very likely, utterly unlike that the composer had been living when his heart-beats took the form of melodious utterance. After the mother had been played into a sufficiently somnolent state by music, whereof she understood only the outside tinkling, and had retired, the inevitable books were once more Ada's companions, until, tired out, she sought her bed, to dream of strange blendings of sweet scents, and sights, and sounds, with world-moving thoughts.

CHAPTER II.

N her well-loved Highland home Ada was rather companionless. And yet one day,

nearly a year after she left school, she found out, most unexpectedly, some one that understood her. In the village of Glenlow there was a certain shop wherein was displayed a most miscellaneous and most attractive collection of objects. Walking-sticks made from the Inverness-shire wood, jewellery whose stones had been sparkling in the bosom of Scotch earth, photo

graphs of Highland scenery, numberless things of more or less uselessness, made from matter, in one form or another, that had been found near Glenlow, made this shop a sort of fairyland to all Glenlow visitors. No tourist had ever been known to leave the place without having spent a sovereign there, and many patresfamilias had been compelled to draw cheques in order to discharge all the claims incurred by them in the course of half an hour at Miss Macnamara's. There were two Miss Macnamaras, as the poor of Glenlow well knew. It would have been impossible for one woman to have done all the good these two middle-aged ladies did in the place.

It was within a day or two of Mary Nisbet's birthday, and Ada had resolved to send her Shelley's poems. Most of Ada's books were obtained from a bookseller in Inverness, but on this particular occasion she had determined to buy her present from the Miss Macnamaras', for these estimable ladies had most of the poets bound in covers, whereon views of beautiful spots near Glenlow were displayed, surrounded by the impress of brown fern leaves and heather.

Therefore Ada walked down one afternoon to Glenlow, and entering Miss Macnamara's shop, asked if she could have a copy of Shelley, with some views outside thereof.

The Miss Macnamara who was at the counter at the moment said "Certainly, Miss Morse," and turned to find the volume in the case behind her.

From some dark inner corner of the shop issued a strong Scotch voice

"Is that Miss Morse asking for Shelley?"

Following the voice came forth into the light a woman of middle height, with powerfully marked features, that wore a pleasant smile of greeting. The woman was plainly but well dressed, and wore a straw hat like her sister did, for their shop door was always open on to the sunny, stony street, and the

northern air bites shrewdly at times. This lady was generally known as "the other Miss Macnamara." Nobody ever seemed certain as to which was the elder of the two. Some people said the two sisters themselves were not quite clear on the point.

"Is that Miss Morse asking for Shelley?" enquired "the other Miss Macnamara" again, with a wondering emphasis on the two names, and with a rich Scotch accent that I wish I could write for you.

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'Yes, surely, Miss Maggie," said Ada. She was one of the oldest inhabitants, and knew "the other Miss Macnamara's" Christian name. "Why not?" She said, "What for no?" really, for she always dropped, almost unconsciously, into the childhood method of talking when speaking to those she had known all her life. But as this story is for Southron eyes and ears as well as for Highland ones, I translate the conversation into a dialect to be understood by all.

"Don't you know that Shelley was an Atheist, and not to be read by all decent bodies?" asked Miss Maggie, with a sly gleam in her dark eyes.

She was a privileged person, was Miss Maggie, and she asked the question with a half-smile you will understand better presently.

Ada broke out impetuously-"An Atheist! How can you say so? You haven't read him. Because he thought more deeply and more lovingly of the Unknowable than ordinary folk-because he would not bow down to the poor human definition of the Indefinablebecause in his hatred of the falsehood, and chicanery, and cold-heartedness that had grown round the great and beautiful truths-he has seemed-seemed onlyto strike at the truths themselves, because - oh! you call him an Atheist."

"Well, but surely," chimed in "the other Miss Macnamara" (her sister was still searching for the book), "Surely his 'Queen Mab' cannot be defended."

She was leaning over the counter, with her eyes