At breakfast next morning Graeme soberly suggested to Lady Elspeth that she should go conger-eeling with him that day. And the shrewd brown eyes looked into his, and twinkled in response to the deep blue and the brown ones opposite, and she said, "I mind I was just a wee bit feather-headed myself for a while after I was married. I caught congers before you were short-coated, my laddie, but I\'m not going catching them now."

"They are a bit rampageous when they\'re grown up," he admitted. "We got one the other day about as thick round as one\'s leg, and it barked like a dog and tried to bite."

"And does he make you go congering, my dear?" she asked Margaret.

"Make?" scoffed Graeme. "Make, forsooth? How little you know! I\'d like to see the man who could make that young person do anything but just what she wishes. Why, she twists us all round her little finger and——"

"Ay, ay! Well, discipline is good for the young, and you\'re just nothing but a laddie in some things."

"I\'m going to keep so all my life. So\'s Meg! Well, suppose we say ormering then, if congering\'s too lively. Hennie Penny\'s an awful dab at ormering. If you\'d seen her the other night when she came home! A tangle of vraic was an old lady\'s best cap in comparison—"

"And how many did I get, and how many did you get?" retorted Miss Penny.

"I got six and you got seven—"

"Seventeen, and you stole four of your six from Meg."

"Oh well, I found the mushrooms, coming home, and they were worth a pailful of ormers."

"You didn\'t beat them long enough. Ormers take a lot of beating," she explained to Lady Elspeth.

"Thumping, she means. My mushrooms beat them hollow,—tender and delicate and fragrant"—and he sniffed appreciatively as though he could scent them still.—"Your ormers were like shoe-soles."

"And as to the mushrooms," continued Hennie Penny, "you\'d never have found them if I hadn\'t tumbled into them, and then you thought they were toadstools."

"Oh well!—Who can\'t take a hook out of a whiting\'s mouth? Who was it screamed when the lobster looked at her?"

"It nearly took a piece out of me."

"Who nearly upset the boat when a baby devilfish came up in the pot? And it wasn\'t above that size!"

"I draw the line at devil-fish. They\'re no\' canny."

"Do they generally go on like this?" asked Lady Elspeth of Margaret.

"All the time," said Margaret, with a matronly air. "They\'re just a couple of children. I keep them out of mischief as well as I can, but it\'s hard work at times."

"She\'s just every bit as bad, you know, when we\'re alone," said Miss Penny. "But she\'s got her company manners on just now. You should see her when she\'s bathing."

"Ah—yes! You should see her when she\'s bathing," said Graeme, with a smack of the lips. "All the little waves and crabs and lobsters keep bobbing up to have another look at her. In Venus\'s Bath the other day—"

"Now, children, stop your fooling. Where shall we go to-day?" laughed Margaret, and Lady Elspeth could hardly take her eyes off her, so winsomely, so radiantly happy was she.

"We old folks will stay at home and talk to Mrs. Carré," s............