"Oh! yes, Father, anything you like," sighed Nessie, choking convulsively over a final sob.

"That's right." A transient unexpected gleam of feeling, which was partly affection, but to a far greater extent pride, lit up Brodie's harsh features like a sudden quiver of light upon a bleak rock.

"Well show Levenford what my clever lass can do. I'm looking ahead and I can see it. When we've made ye the head scholar of the Academy, then you'll see what your father means to do wi' you. But ye must stick in to your lessons, stick in hard." He raised his eyes from her to the distance, as though contemplating the future, and murmured, "We'll show them." Then he lowered his eyes, patted Nessie's bowed, straw-coloured head, and added, "You're my own lass, right enough! Ye'll be a credit to the name of Brodie."

Then as he turned his head, his gaze lit upon his other daughter, and immediately his face altered, his eye darkened.

"Mary!"

"Yes, Father."

"A word with you that's so ready with your jabbering tongue!"

In his sardonic irony he became smooth, leaning back in his chair and weighing his words with a cold, judicial calm.

"It's a pleasant thing for a man to get news o' his family from outsiders. Ay, it's a roundabout way, no doubt, and doesna reflect much credit on the head o' the house but that's more or less a detail, and it was fair stimulatin' for me to get news o' ye the day that nearly made me spew." As he continued his tone chilled progressively. "But in conversation with a member of the Borough Council to-day I was informed that you had been seen in Church Street in conversation with a young gentleman, a very pretty young gentleman." He showed his teeth at her and continued cuttingly, "Who I believe is a low, suspicious character, a worthless scamp."

In a voice that was almost a wail, Mrs. Brodie feebly interposed:

"No! no! Mary! It wasn't you, a respectable girl like you. Tell your father it wasn't you."