ruin at the foot of the Gallow Hill (where I found the little fairy farm and flower-garden) wear a dreary aspect, more desolate even than those frequent ruins of desolated homes -just two gaunt roofless gables that are seen afar in distant fields from the windows of some passing train. There remains only a heap of big foundationstones smothered in weeds and thistles.

Nothing certain is known about the Gallow Hill, or the meaning of its gruesome name. Straight up the steep brae leads the path to the spot where it is said the gallows stood. All who came and went through that cottage door must have seen it. From the peephole window by the hearth it would be for ever in sight. One can fancy how, as years went on, the little home would become distasteful to the dwellers in it, and it was at last deserted and pulled down. The hillside grass is fine and short,

and thick with flowers. The track climbs through a plantation of young spruce and between the hoary boles of a few ancient beeches, and then, the summit reached, one may rest upon the heather, all interwoven with blaeberry and thyme, and dream away a sunny August hour. All around, above, below, reigns profoundest silence. No living creatures can be seen save the feeding cattle and white sea-gulls, down in the low-lying pasture-lands. A wide landscape fraught with the stillness of deep peace spreads away and away to the far horizonline of lilac hills. The sun shines sweetly on near farms and woods. On such a day, it might well have been, took place the last tragedy connected with the gibbet when it stood there, reared up on the hill-crest where we now take our ease, resting among

the honey - scented heath - bells. From the highroad a mile away, and from every path and every house within sight, the awful Thing could be seen, silhouetted black against the sun-bright sky. The half-forgotten tales that with difficulty may be extracted still from the country-folk round about are of the vaguest. Whatever happened here must have been at least 150 years ago. The parish archives-a part of which perished by fire-are silent upon the subject. Some say this was the place of execution for the whole of New Machar; others, that here stood the gallows-tree of the lairds of Elrick, in the ugly old times when the lairds, or barons, "had power of pit and gallows.' of pit and gallows." No deep loch -like the loch of Spynie-being near at hand, the maintenance of a gallows was of course a necessary expense! "The oldest inhabitant" tells a tradition of his boyhood. Two herd-boys posted on the hill to watch the cattle (the land was not in those days enclosed) were playing together, and one hung up the other in sport upon a tree. Returning in an hour, the lad was dead as he hung. Then the boy suffered death himself, on the gibbet set up for him alone. Yet another and more ghastly tradition lingers, and would seem to point to the first idea, of a place of public execution. They say that one hot summer a hundred years ago the ripened berries had to be left to hang ungathered on the bushes in cottage-gardens within a certain distance of the Gallow Hill. Whatever may be the truth of all that is said to have happened here in those far days, time has since so wrought as to mellow into wild loveliness the once drear aspect of the hill of doom. We only know it now as a flowery brae from whose summit is seen the prettiest

home-view in all the countryside. Children love to play there; and thither will many a lover and his lass stroll out on Sunday afternoons. They never trouble about the old grim past! whilst I, who forget it never, often turn my steps that way in fond iteration. A part of the attraction simply means, it must be owned, that after a long walk southward, to return round by the Gallow Brae is usually the nearest way home.

Across the moss-rich in June and July with golden sedge and bog-buttercup, or white with downy tufts of pussies (cottongrass) the uncertain track is lost -at times a little unaccountably in a great voiceless pine- wood. It may be found again on the margin of a little lonely loch, whence it leads back through the pines, out into the cheerful roads. The Great Wood (so named by none except myself!) is not really very large, only its extent is greater than some other neighbouring woods. The charm of it is ideal. Even in autumn it is all suffused with the fragrance of the firs. The tall trees stand apart, and give breathing-room for every kind of wood wild-flower to push up and thrive, through the brown carpet of fallen fir-needles. Patches of purple heather, with intervals of rosy ling, mix with the bright emerald of wood-sorrel. Hosts of small scabious toss light balls of lilac wool in all the more open greener spaces, above a network of creeping tormentilla. Ferns there are in profusest, daintiest variety, half-hiding scarcer crowberry with dark polished foliage. Thinly scattered through all the outer fringes of the wood - luxuriantly crowding the deeper, cooler shades-the eye is conscious of pale-brown triplet leaves on delicate inch-long stalks.

It is wintergreen (Trientalis europea), pride of the northern woods.

Why our English name

is wintergreen were hard to tell. When in June their prime was done, the little white flowers loosed hold and fell away-not petal by petal, but whole, like scattered snow stars. Then, along with fresh green summer, the substance of leaves and stalks decayed, until all the plant seemed dipped in a brown autumnal dye. By-andby each sombre coloured triple leaf upheld a pearly seed or two. Often in warm September days. has this white seed deceived unwary strangers, who, forgetting how the flowery time is long past, think to find fresh blooms upon the wintergreen. Soon these brown reliquiæ with their pearls shall perish and burn away into oblivion-small mimic flames of crimson.

Signs of some small arboreous

life are not wanting in the wood. The ground is littered with short ends and tassels of firtwigs nipt off from upper branches. Squirrels mostly are accused of the mischief (mischief far more likely to be the work of the insidious pine- beetle). A surer token of the unseen active presence somewhere of these little sportive beings is, that every red "tode-stol" has been skinned on the very first day of its appearing. In the brisk clear atmosphere of the fir-wood no such unwelcome guest as a corpse candle," so called, will ever peer in among the throngs of fine tawny agarics springing up from under tawny fir-needles. These, with shy violet ones that enliven sometimes the moist dead leaves lying underneath isolated beech, seem to escape attention from the squirrels. They are never peeled as are the scarlet and orange. Do the little rascal

ment of her skirt invited her companion to do likewise.

"I may not get another chance," she began, calmly; "but I owe you-shall I call it a confession? I have been making up my mind as to how much I should tell you, and have now decided to tell you all." She stopped as if to gain strength, and West struck in hurriedly

"I don't think you owe me any explanation. Had we not better forget the ring and its story?"

"So I have thought," she replied; "but no; on the whole, you had better hear. I owe it to myself if not to you." West nodded. "You are the best judge," he remarked, almost to his cigar.

"Let me begin from the beginning, then," she said. "I was born and brought up in a country rectory in an old-fashioned way. My knowledge of life was absolutely nil at best it came from sheepish flirtations with a callow curate every girl, you will say, I suppose, can flirt by the light of nature; at its worst, from the gossip of a few girls as wise as myself, I married my husband when I was a child of eighteen, who knew as much about marriage as any uneducated child of eighteen can." She stopped to draw her cloak about her with an expressive shiver. The next sentences came with a pathetic rush. "My husband was a mere boy, with much more money than was good for him or for me. Unlike myself, he had been educated on modern methods. We plunged into the whirl of society, and for a time I was as happy as any girl could be who discovers what wealth and social status can give her. Then came disillusionment. It must come, I suppose, to us all; it came to me when I was but a

young wife. been brought up differently, I might have accepted my awakening with equanimity. Any way, I didn't. My husband was rich, and he was weak. Worst of all, he was as clay in the hands of every woman who chose to exercise her power; and women, God knows!-some women-can be merciless as well as vicious. We drifted apart; it was my fault— I didn't think so then, but I think so now-for I was too angry to put out a hand to save him. He knew he was-was not what he ought to have been. He loved me after his fashion-that I also believe now, but I didn't believe it thenand-and then he took to drinking. It is the old, old story; there were quarrels, and the breach grew wider. Our differences came to a head. We were both young and hot-tempered, and I had been trained to look on the life he was leading as worse than death. We parted-I returned to my father, and he, after a few solitary months in London, went to the Cape." Her eyes had filled with tears, and she had crumpled up one glove into a tight ball—these were the only signs of what the recital was costing her.

No doubt, if I had

"Before he left," she continued, "he came down to the Rectoryand I let him go. I was mad, drunk with indignation if you will, and I spurned him from my presence. He went; and the rest you know."

Her voice had choked. "That ring," she added, drawing it softly from her finger, "had been a present from myself. I had given it him in those happy days of my courtship and girlhood, when love had first come into my life." The wistful cadences of her voice seemed to haunt the air with the balm of moonlight summer nights and lovers' vows.

"That

scrap of a letter which you found -ah! I am glad he got it, for in it I had asked him to come back, and let the past be forgotten."

She broke off, and turned to him with eyes that awaited his verdict. Moved by a sudden impulse, he held out his hand. "I am both sorry and glad you have told me," he said, with deep emotion: "sorry to have given you the pain of telling a stranger what he had no right to hear; but glad because"

his voice wavered in spite of himself "if I honoured you before, I honour you still more tonight."

She glanced back at him, the flicker of a happy smile in her painstricken eyes, and took his hand. It was as if they had clasped hands over a grave. "It seems

so long ago," she went on, presently, "that I can now talk about it calmly. I often wonder whether I am the same woman who went through that terrible ordeal. The past seven years have taught me much they have taught me to forgive that poor boy all his foolish dissipation; and, thanks to you, I know that he had forgiven me. I was no fit wife for him-believe me, I was not. I ought never to have married him; but, like so many young girls, I mistook mere physical admiration for love. I now see that I never really loved him. If I had, I should have been more forbearing, for the quintessence of a woman's love is the divine gift of charity. Yes, yes," she added, almost impatiently, "it is; and the cruelty of my act lies here. My marriage ruined his life, while it saved mine. It taught me that love is not something which comes to a woman unasked for that is the view of most girls and some women; but it is hopelessly wrong. Love, like everything else worth having in life, is something you

must win. You remember the saying of Milton about the beautiful life and the beautiful poem. Well-love, real love, can only be won by a woman, can only be inspired by a woman, when she makes her life beautiful. Ah! but I mustn't perplex you with my metaphysics—a woman's metaphysics," she added, with a smile. "You have your own creed, have you not? Supposing you go and fetch my brother, and forget all I have been saying."

She rose, still smiling, and the interview was at an end.

But if Everard West was reluctant to leave her before, he was doubly reluctant after that evening. And yet, abuse himself as he might, he could not point to any conclusive reason for staying. Mrs Heathcote was not beautiful

that is to say, she had eyes whose mystery was inexhaustible, and a voice whose timbre had an uncanny way of vibrating long after words had been uttered, but most distinctly she was not beautiful-from the military point of view. West knew a dozen women who in beauty were vastly her superior, to talk to whom, however, he would not have walked across the Terrace. No; it was not her beauty which kept him at her side. But had Captain West been a psychologist, he would have recognised that in reality it was under the spell of character and personality he had fallen. He was only beginning dimly to feel that in a woman, as in a man, mind can be a far more potent wizard than mere beauty of face or body. Her care for her delicate brother; her touching ways with the infants on the Terrace; her child-like purity of thought, shining in every word and look; her virginal daintiness of soul, of which the twist of a ribbon in her hair, the posy of

flowers in her belt, the subtle harmonies in her dress, seemed to be the outward and fragrant symbols, -these were what stole with hourly triumph over him. She seemed

a

to move, to think, to have her being in an atmosphere which awed his senses and left him bewildered. Experience of life cannot be too dearly bought-that had been his own creed-and he had seen the world in its most naked and dirtiest aspects. But here was woman who, like himself, had come into contact with human beings in their vilest phases, who had been forced to drink of sorrow and degradation, and who had come through the ordeal unscathed. Not one speck of mire had soiled even the hem of her robe; she had seen the mud, had walked through the mud, and it had been powerless to hurt her. West had known beautiful women, clever women, honourable women; he had been intimate with women who were neither beautiful, clever, nor honourable; he had been "in love," as most men, a dozen times; but not until this week had he even dreamed of what reverence for womanhood could mean. It was as if a new sense had suddenly swum into his ken, and had trampled contemptuously on the philosophy which had taken fifteen bitter years to build. And then there would surge over him, as he tossed on his sleepless bed, the hot consciousness that this new light had dawned on himself, who had been-ah! what had he not been?

of your society." Her words touched him to the quick.

"I never know when you are chaffing me," he replied, tilting his straw hat nervously over his eyes.

"That is unkind," she replied, at once. "I meant it sincerely. You have given my brother a new lease of life."

"He is not the only man who has been altered," West boldly rejoined; "I too

"Might I not say something about chaffing?" she interrupted. "I thought cynics never altered. Cynicism is like the laws of the Medes and Persians, is it not?"

"But why persist in calling me a cynic? Is it quite fair?"

She looked at him in puzzled simplicity. "Perhaps you are right," she said, thoughtfully. "Cynics, after all, are not enigmas, and you are a terrible enigma. Oh yes, you are," smiling down his protest, "and you delight in the fact. What foolishness it is to say women are riddles ! it is men who are the riddles. Man, I am sure, is the last riddle that will be solved by woman."

"But how does this apply?"

Well-pardon my franknessbut I often wonder what you are going to do with yourself?" The interest in her eyes and voice was unmistakable.

"Do with myself?" he repeated, as if he disliked the idea. "Oh, I suppose do as I did before."

"What! go back to spill more blood in South Africa? If I were you, that is just what I should not do."

"May I hear what you would

do?"

"Oh, certainly!" She fiddled with her parasol. "I should retire and

"Retire!" he laughed. "Retire and become a fat squire with an uncomfortable past become a de