FIVEKELSO on the Tweed had a pretty setting, and a ruin of a cathedral one-third as old, and one-tenth as weird, as some of the ruins in India. Sir Walter Scott was old and sick at nearby Abbotsford, but his tales were hard for me to read and his characters seemed pale compared to the hero Rāma, and the Dwarf, and other half-gods of whom Manu had told me. The sun at summer midday was pale and feeble compared with the Indian sun at winter rising; the fogs off the river darkened my eyes, and the autumn winds bit me to the bone.
My step-grandfather, Noah Ferguson, did his duty by me with grim conscientiousness. He said it was no less because we were not blood kin; I was his son’s stepdaughter, and he would see that I walked the straight and narrow path into Christian womanhood. The prayers w
