One day suddenly, however, the old statesman died, and his fiddle was
heard no more across the valley in the quiet of the evening, but was
left untouched for the dust to gather on it where he himself had hung
it on the nail in the kitchen under his hat. Then when life seemed to
the forlorn girl a wide blank, a world without a sun in it, Angus Ray
went over for the first time as a suitor to the cottage under
Castenand, and put his hand in hers and looked calmly into her eyes.
He told her that a girl could not live long an unfriended life like
hers--that she should not if she could; she could not if she
would--would she not come to him?

It was the force of the magnet to the steel. With swimming eyes she
looked up into his strong face, tender now with a tremor never before
seen there; and as he drew her gently towards him her glistening tears
fell hot and fast over her brightening and now radiant face, and, as
though to hide them from him, she laid her head on his breast. This
was all the wooing of Angus Ray.

They had two sons, and of these the younger more nearly resembled his
mother. Willy Ray had not merely his mother's features; he had her
disposition also. He had the rounded neck and lissom limbs of a woman;
he had a woman's complexion, and the light of a woman's look in his
soft blue eyes. When the years gave a thin curly beard to his cheek
they took nothing from its delicate comeliness. It was as if nature
had down to the last moment meant Willy for a girl. He had been an apt
scholar at school, and was one of the few persons in Wythburn having
claims to education. Willy's elder brother, Ralph, more nearly
resembled his father. He had his father's stature and strength of
limb, but some of his mother's qualities had also been inherited by