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Sir Robert's Fortune
CHAPTER XIII
The day was one of those Highland days which are a dream of freshness and beauty and delight. I do not claim that they are very frequent, but sometimes they will occur in a cluster, two or three together, like a special benediction out of heaven. The sun has a purity, a clearness, an ecstasy of light which it has nowhere else. It looks, as it were, with a heavenly compunction upon earth and sky, as if to make up for the many days when it is absent, expanding over mountain and moor with a smiling which seems personal and full of intention. The air is life itself, uncontaminated with any evil emanation, full of the warmth of the sun, and the odor of the fir-trees and heather, and the murmur of all the living things about. The damp and dew which linger in the shady places disappear as if by magic. No unkindly creature, no venomous thing, is abroad; no noise, no jar of living, though every thing lives and grows and makes progress with such silent and smiling vigor. The two lovers in the midst of this incense-breathing nature, so still, yet so strong, so peaceful, yet so vigorous, felt that the scene was made for them, that no surroundings could have been more fitly prepared and tempered for the group which was as the group in Eden before trouble came. They wandered about together through the glen, and by the side of the shining brown trout stream, which glowed and smiled among the rocks, reflecting every ray and every cloud as it hurried and sparkled along, always in haste, yet always at leisure. They lingered here and there, in a spot which was still more beautiful than all the others, though not so beautiful as the next, which tempted them a little further on. Sometimes Ronald’s rod was taken out and screwed together; sometimes even flung over a dark pool, where there were driftings and leapings of trout, but pulled in again before, as Lily said, any harm was done. “For why should any peaceful creature get a sharp hook in its jaw because you and me are happy?” she said. “That’s no reason.” Ronald, but for the pride of having something to carry back in his basket, was much of her opinion. He was not a devoted fisherman. Their happiness was no reason, clearly, for interfering with that of the meanest thing that lived. And they talked about every thing in heaven and earth, not only of their own affairs, though they were interesting enough. Lily, who for a month had spoken to nobody except Beenie, save for that one visit to the Manse, had such an accumulation of remark and observation to get through on her side, and so much to demand from him, that the moments, and, indeed, the hours, flew. It is astonishing, even without the impulse of a long parting and sudden meeting, what wells of conversation flow forth between two young persons in their circumstances. Perhaps it would not sound very wise or witty if any cool spectator listened, but it is always delightful to the people concerned, and Lily was not the first comer, so to speak. She was full of variety, full of whim and fancy, no heaviness or monotony in her. Perhaps this matters less at such a moment of life than at any other. The dullest pair find the art of entertaining each other, of keeping up their mutual interest. And now that the cold chill of doubt in respect to Ronald was removed from her mind Lily flowed like the trout stream, as dauntless and as gay, reflecting every gleam of light.
“The worst thing is,” Ronald said, “that the Vacation will come to an end, not now or soon, Heaven be praised; but the time will come when I shall have to go back and pace the Parliament House, as of old, and my Lily will be left alone in the wilderness.”
“Not alone, as I was before,” said Lily—“never that any more; for now I have something to remember, and something to look forward to. You’ve been here, Ronald; nothing can take that from us. I will come and sit on this stone, and say to myself: ‘Here we spent the day; and here we had our picnic; and this was what he said.’ And I will laugh at all your jokes over again.”
“Ah!” he said, “it’s but a grim entertainment that. I went and stood behind those curtains in that window, do you remember? in George Square, and said to myself: ‘Here my Lily was; and here she said–’ But, instead of laughing, I was much more near crying. You will not find much good in that.”
“You crying!” she said, with the water in her eyes, and a little soft reproving blow of her fingers upon his cheek. “I do not believe it. But I dare say I shall cry and then laugh. What does it matter which? They are just the same for a girl. And then I shall say to myself: ‘At the New Year he is coming back again, and then–’”
“What shall we do at the New Year?” he said. “No days like this then. How can I take my Lily out on the moor among the snow?”
“If I am a Lily, I am one that can bloom anywhere—in the snow as well as the sun.”
“And so you are, my dearest, making a sunshine in a shady place. But still we must think of that. Winter and summer are two different things. Cannot we find a friend to take us in?”
“I will tell you where we shall find a friend. You’ll come to the Tower with your boldest face as if it was the first time you had been near. And you will ask: ‘Does Miss Ramsay live here?’ And Katrin will say: ‘’Deed does she, sir. Here and no other place.’ And you will smite your thigh in your surprise, and say: ‘I thought I had heard that! I am a friend from Edinburgh, and I just stopped on the road to [here say any name you please] to say “Good-day” to the young lady, if she was here.’ And then you will look about, and you will say: ‘It is rather a lonesome place.’”
“Go on,” said Ronald, laughing; “I like the dialogue—though whether we should trust your keepers so far as that–”
“My keepers! They are my best of friends! Well, Katrin will look round too, and she will say, as if considering the subject for the first time: ‘In winter it is, maybe, a wee lonesome—for a young leddy. Ye’ll maybe be a friend of Sir Robert’s, too?’ And you will say: ‘Oh, yes, I am a great friend of Sir Robert’s.’ And she will open the door wide and say: ‘Come ben, sir, come ben. It will be a great divert to our young leddy to see a visitor. And you’re kindly welcome.’ That’s what she will say.”
“Will she say all that, and shall I say all that? Perhaps I shall, including that specious phrase about being a friend of Sir Robert’s, which would surprise Sir Robert very much.”
“Well, you know him, surely, and you are not unfriends. It strikes me that, to be a lawyer, Ronald, you are full of scruples.”
“What a testimonial to my virtue!” he said, with a laugh. “But it is not scruples; it is pure cowardice, Lily. Are they to be trusted? If Sir Robert were to be written to, and I to be forbidden the door, and my Lily carried off to a worse wilderness, abroad, as he threatened!”
“I will tell you one thing: I will not go!” said Lily, “not if Sir Robert were ten times my uncle. But you need not fear for Katrin. She likes me better than Sir Robert. You may think that singular, but so it is. And I am much more fun,” cried Lily, “far more interesting! I include you, and you and me together, we are a story, we are a romance! And Katrin will like us better than one of the Waverley novels, and she will be true to us to the last drop of her blood.”
“These Highlanders, you never can be sure of them,” said Ronald, shaking his head. He spoke the sentiment of his time and district, which was too near the Highland line to put much confidence in the Celt.
“But she is not a Highlander. She is Aberdeen,” cried Lily. “Beenie is a Highlander, if you call Kinloch-Rugas Highland, and she is as true as steel. Oh, you are a person of prejudices, Ronald; but I trust all the world,” she cried, lifting her fine and shining face to the shining sky.
“And so do I,” he cried, “to-day!” And they paused amid all considerations of the past and future to remember the glory of the present hour, and how sweet it was above every thing that it should be to-day.
Thus the afternoon fled. They made their little table in the sunshine, for shade is not as desirable in a Highland glen as in a Southern valley, and ate their luncheon merrily together, Lily recounting, with a little shame, how it had been intended for Helen Blythe instead of Ronald Lumsden. “I was very near telling a fib,” she said compunctiously, “but I did not do it. I left it to Katrin’s imagination.”
“Helen Blythe must have a robust appetite if all this was for her,” he said. “Is this an effort of imagination too? But come, Lily, we must do our duty by the view. There is the old brig to climb, and all the Fairy Glen to see.”
“I promised not to climb the old brig,” she said. “But that promise, I suppose, was only to hold in case it was Helen Blythe that was with me, for she could give little help if I slipped, whereas you–”
“I? I hope I can take care of my Lily,” said the young man; and after they had packed their basket, and put it ready to be tied once more to Rory’s saddle, who was picnicking too on the grass in one continuous and delicate meal, they wandered off together to make the necessary pilgrimage, though the old brig and the Fairy Glen attracted but little of the attention of the pair, so fully engrossed in each other. They climbed the broken arch, however, which was half embedded in the slope of the bank, and overgrown with every kind of green and flourishing thing, arm in arm, Ronald swinging his companion lightly over the dangerous bits, for love, while Lily, for love, consented to be aided, though little needing the aid. And how it happened will never be known, but their happy progress came to a sudden pause on an innocent bit of turf where no peril was. If it were Ronald who stepped false, or Lily, neither of them could tell, but in a moment calamity came. He disengaged himself from her, almost roughly, pushing her away, and thus, instead of dragging her with him, crashed down alone through the briers and bushes, with a noise which, to Lily, filled the air like thunder. When she had slipped and stumbled in her fright and anxiety after him, she found him lying, trying to laugh, but with his face contorted with pain, among the nettles and weeds at the bottom. “What has happened? What has happened?” she cried.
“What an ass I am,” said he, “and what a nuisance for you, Lily! I believe I have sprained my ankle, of all the silly things to do! and at this time, of all others, betraying you!”
Lily, I need not say, was for a moment at her wit’s end. There were no ambulance classes in those days, nor attempts to train young ladies in the means of first help. But there is always the light of nature, a thing much to be trusted to, all the same. Lily took his handkerchief, because it was the largest, and bound up his foot, as far as that was possible, cutting open the boot with his knife; and then they held a brief council of war. Ronald wished to be left there while she went for help, but there was no likelihood of obtaining help nearer than Kinloch-Rugas, and finally it was decided that, in some way or other, he should struggle on to Rory’s back, and so be led to the Manse, where a welcome and aid were sure to be found. It was a terrible business getting this accomplished, but with patience, and a good deal of pain, it was done at last, the injured foot supported tant bien que mal in the stirrup, and a woful little group set forth on the way to the village. But I do wrong to say it was a woful group, for, though the pain made Ronald faint, and though Lily’s heart was full of anguish and anxiety, they both exerted themselves to the utmost, each for the sake of the other. Lily led the reluctant pony along, sometimes running by his side, sometimes dragging him with both her hands, too much occupied for thought. What would people think did not occur to her yet. People might think what they liked so long as she got him safe to the Manse. She knew that they would be kind to him there. But what an end it was to the loveliest of days: and the sun was beginning to get low, and the road so long.
“Oh, Rory, man!” cried poor Lily, apostrophizing the pony after the manner of Dougal. “If you would only go steady and go soft to-day! To-morrow you may throw me if you like, and I will never mind; but, oh, go canny, if there is any heart in you, to-day!” I think that Rory felt the appeal by some magnetism in her touch if not by her words, on which point I cannot say any thing positively; but he did at least overcome his flightiness, and accomplished the last half of the road at a steady trot, which gave Ronald exquisite pain, and kept Lily running, but shortened considerably the period of their suffering. They were received with a great outcry of sympathy and compassion at the Manse, where Ronald was laid out at once on the big hair-cloth sofa, and his foot relieved as much as Helen’s skill, which was not inconsiderable, could do. It was he who made the necessary explanations, Lily, in her trouble, having quite forgot the necessity for them.
“I was so happy,” he said, “so fortunate as to be seen by Miss Ramsay, who knew me—the only creature hereabouts who does; and you see what she has done for me: helped me to struggle up, put me on her pony, and brought me here—a perfect good Samaritan.”
“Oh, don’t, don’t speak like that!” said Lily in her distress. She felt she could not at this moment bear the lie. Nobody had ever seen Lily Ramsay so dishevelled before: her hair shaken out by her run, her skirt torn where she had caught her foot in it in her struggles to help Ronald, and covered with the dust of the road.
“She would just be that,” said Helen Blythe, receiving the narrative with faith undoubting, “and what a good thing it was you, my dear, that knew the gentleman, and not a strange person! And what a grand thing that you were riding upon Rory! Just lie as quiet as you can; the hot bathing will relieve the pain, and now the boot’s off ye’ll be easier; and the doctor will come in to see you as soon as he comes home. Don’t ye make a movement, sir, that ye can help. Just lie quiet, lie quiet! that is the chief remedy of all.”
“He is Mr. Lumsden, Helen,” said Lily, composed, “a friend of my uncle’s, from Edinburgh. Oh, I am glad he is in your hands. He had slipped down the broken arch at the old brig, where all the tourists go; and I had ridden there to-day just to see it.”
“Eh, my dear, how thankful you must be,” was all Helen’s reply; but it seemed to Lily that the old minister in his big chair by the fireside gave her a glance which was not so all-believing as Helen’s.
“It was just an extraordinary piece of good luck for the young man,” the minister said. “Things seldom happen so pat in real life. But a young lady like you, Miss Lily, likes the part of the good Samaritan.”
She could not look him full in the face, and the laugh with which he ended his speech seemed the most cruel of mocking sounds to poor Lily. She put up her hands to her tumbled hair.
“May I go to your room and make myself tidy?” she said to Helen. “I had to run most of the way with Rory, and my skirt so long for riding. I don’t know what sort of dreadful person they must have thought me in the town.”
“Nobody but will think all the better of you for your kindness,” said Helen, “and we’ll soon mend your skirt, for there’s really little harm done. And I think you should have the gig from the inn to drive you back, my dear, for your nerves are shaken, and the afternoon’s getting late, and you must not stir from here till you have got a good rest and a cup of tea.”
“The gig may perhaps take me back to the inn first,” said Ronald, “for it is there I am staying—for the fishing,” he added, unable to keep out of his eyes a half-comic glance at the companion of his trouble.
“Indeed, you are going back to no inn,” said Helen; “you are just going to stay at the Manse, where you will be much better attended to; and Lily, my dear, you’ll come and see Mr. Lumsden, that owes so much to you already, and that will help to make him feel at home here.”
But when Lily came down stairs, smoothed and brushed, with her hair trim, and the flush dying off her cheeks, and her skirt mended, though in many ways the accident had ended most fortunately, she could not meet the smile in the old minister’s eyes.
CHAPTER XIV
There was great excitement in the Tower when the gig from “the toun” was seen slowly climbing the brae. Almost every-body in the house was in commotion, and Beenie, half crazy with anxiety, had been at the window for hours watching for Lily’s return, and indulging in visions and conjectures which her companions knew nothing of. All that Dougal and Katrin thought of was an accident. Though, as they assured each other, Rory’s bark was worse than his bite, it was yet quite possible that in one of his cantrips he might have thrown the inexperienced rider in her long skirt; and even if she was not hurt, she might have found it impossible to catch him again and might have to toil home on foot, which would account for the lateness of the hour. Or she might have sprained her ankle or even broken her arm as she fell, and been unable to move. When these fears began to take shape, the boy had been sent off flying on the black pony to the scene of the picnic, the only argument against this hypothesis being that, had any such accident happened, Rory by this time would in all probability have reached home by himself. Beenie, I need not say, was tormented by other fears. Was it possible that they had fled together, these two who had now fully discovered that they could not live without each other? Had he carried her away, as it had been on the cards he should have done three months ago? and a far better solution than any other of the problem. These ideas alternated in Robina’s mind with the suggestion of an accident. She did not believe in an accident. Lily had always been masterful, able to manage any thing that came in her way, “beast or bird,” as Beenie said, and was it likely she would be beaten by Rory, a little Highland pony, when she had ridden big horses by Sir Robert’s side, and never stumbled? Na. “She’ll just have gone away with him,” Beenie said to herself, and though she felt wounded that the plan had not been revealed to her, she was not sorry, only very anxious, feeling that Lily would certainly find some opportunity of sending her a word, and telling her where to join them. “It is, maybe, the best way out of it,” she said over and over again to herself, and accordingly she was less moved by Katrin’s wailings than that good woman could understand. Katrin and Dougal were out upon the road, while Beenie kept her station at the window. And Dougal’s fears for the young lady were increased by alarms about his pony, an older and dearer friend than Lily. “If the poor beast has broken his knees, I’ll ne’er forgive myself for letting that bit lassie have the charge of him alone.”
“The charge of him!” said his wife in high indignation, “and her that has, maybe, twisted her ankle, or broken her bonnie airm, the darlin’, and a’ the fault of that ill-willy beast. And it’s us that has the chairge of her.”
This argument silenced Dougal for the moment, but he still continued to think quite as much of Rory as of the young lady, whichever of the two was responsible for the trouble which had occurred. When the boy came back to report that there was nothing to be found at the old brig but great marks on the ruin, as if somebody had “slithered down,” branches torn away, and the herbage crushed at the bottom, the alarm in the house rose high. And Dougal had fixed his cap firmly on the top of his head, as a man prepared for any emergency, and taken his staff in his hand to take the short cut across the moor, and find out for himself what the catastrophe had been, when a shout from Sandy on the top of the bank, and Beenie at the window, stopped further proceedings. There was Lily, pale, but smiling, in the gig from the inn, and Rory, tossing his red head, very indignant at the undignified position in which he found himself, tied to that shabby equipage. “The puir beast, just nickering with joy at the sight of home, but red with rage to be trailed at the tail of an inn geeg,” Dougal said, hurrying to loose the rope and lead the sufferer in. He was not without concern for Lily, but she was evidently none the worse, and he asked no more.
“I have had such an adventure,” she said, as soon as she was within hearing, “but I am not hurt, and nothing has happened to me. Such an adventure! What do you think, Beenie? A gentleman climbed up the old brig while we were there, and slipped and fell; and when I ran to see, who should it be but Mr. Lumsden, Ronald Lumsden, whom we used to see so much in Edinburgh.” Here Lily’s countenance bloomed so suddenly red out of her paleness that Katrin had a shock of understanding, and saw it all in a moment, if not more than there was to see. “And he had sprained his ankle,” Lily said, a paleness following the flush; “he couldn’t move. You may fancy what a state we were in.”
“Eh,” said Katrin, with her eyes fixed on Lily’s face, “what a good thing Miss Eelen was with you, for she kens as much about that sort o’ thing as the doctor himsel’.”
“I got him on the pony at last,” said Lily, “and we bound up his foot, and then we took him to the Manse. It was the nearest, and the doctor just at their door. But, oh, what a race I had with the pony, leading him, and sometimes he led me till I had to run; and I put my foot through my skirt, see? We mended it up a little at the Manse, and drew it out of the gathers. But look here: a job for you, Beenie. And my hair came down about my shoulders, and if you had seen the figure I was, running along the road–”
“But Miss Eelen with ye made a’ right,” said Katrin. “Ah, what a blessing that Miss Eelen was with ye.”
Lily was getting out of the gig, from the high seat of which she had hastened to make her first explanations. It was not an easy thing getting out of a high gig in those days, and “the geeg from the inn” was, naturally, without any of the latest improvements. She had to turn her back to the spectators as she clambered down, and if her laugh sounded a little unsteady, that was quite natural. “She is, indeed, as good as the doctor,” she said; “if you had seen how she cut open the boot and made him comfortable! And Rory behaved very well, too,” she said. “I spoke to him in his ear as you do, Dougal. I said: ‘Rory, Rory, my bonnie man, go canny to-day; you can throw me to-morrow, if you like, an I’ll never mind, but, oh, go canny to-day.’ And you did, Rory, you dear little fellow, and dragged me, with my hair flying like a wild creature, along the road,” she added, with a laugh, taking the rough and tossing head into her hands, and aiming a kiss at Rory’s shaggy forehead. But the pony was not used to such dainties and tossed himself out of her hands.
“You’re awfu’ tired, Miss Lily, though you’re putting so good a face upon it, and awfu’ shaken with the excitement, and a’ that. And to think o’ you being the one to find him—just the right person, the one that knew him—and to think of him being here, Maister Lumsden, touring or shooting or something, I suppose.”
Beenie’s speech ended spasmodically in a fierce grip of the arm with which Lily checked her as she went upstairs.
“What need have you,” said the young lady in an angry whisper, “to burden your mind with lies? Say I have to do it, and, oh, I hate it! but you have no need. Hold your tongue and keep your conscience free.”
“Eh, Miss Lily,” said Beenie in the same tone, “I’m no wanting to be better than you. If ye tell a lee, and it’s but an innocent lee, I’ll tell one too. If you’re punished for it, what am I that I shouldna take my share with my mistress? But about the spraining o’ the ankle, my bonnie dear: that’s a’ true?”
Lily answered with a laugh to the sudden doubt in Robina’s eyes. She was very much excited, too much so to feel how tired she was, and capable of nothing without either laughter or tears. “Oh, yes, it’s quite true; and, oh, Beenie, he is badly hurt and suffering a great deal of pain. Poor Ronald! But he will be safe in Helen’s hands. If he were only out of pain! Perhaps it is a good thing, Beenie. That is what he whispered when I came away. Oh, how hard it was to come away and leave him there ill, and his foot so bad! but I am to go down to-morrow, and it will be a duty to stay as long as I can to cheer him up and to save Helen trouble, who has so many other things to do. I am not hard-hearted; but he says himself, if he were only out of pain, perhaps it’s a good thing.”
Here Lily stopped and cried, and murmured among her tears: “If it had only been me! It’s easier for a girl to bear pain than a man.”
“But if it had been you, Miss Lily, it would have been no advantage. You can go to him at the Manse, but he could not have come to you here.”
“That is true,” cried Lily, laughing; “you are a clever Beenie to think of that. But how am I to live till to-morrow, all the long night through, and all the morning without news?”
“A young gentleman doesna die of a sprained ankle,” said Beenie sedately, “and if you are a good bairn, and will go early to bed, and take care of yourself, I’ll see that the boy goes into the toun the first thing in the morning to hear how he is.”
“You are a kind Beenie,” cried Lily, clasping her arms about her maid’s neck. But it was a long time before Robina succeeded in quieting the girl’s excitement. She had to hear the story again half-a-dozen times over, now in its full reality, now in the form which it had to bear for the outside world, with all the tears and laughter which accompanied it. “And he grew so white, so white, I thought he was going to faint,” said Lily, herself growing pale.
“I’m thankful ye were spared that. It is very distressing to see a person faint, Miss Lily.”
“And then he cheered up and gave a grin in the middle of his pain: I will not call it a smile, for it was no more than a grin, half fun and half torture. Poor Ronald! oh, my poor lad, my poor lad!”
“He was a lucky lad to get you to do all that for him, Miss Lily.”
“Me! What did it matter if it was me or you or a fishwife,” said Lily, “when a man is in such dreadful pain?”
They discussed it over and over again from every point of view, until Lily fell asleep from sheer weariness in the hundredth repetition of the story. Beenie, for her part, was exceedingly discreet at supper that evening. Indeed, she was altogether too discreet to be successful with a quick observer like Katrin, who saw, by the extreme precautions of her friend, and the close-shut lips with which Beenie minced and bridled, and made little remarks about nothing in particular, that there was something to conceal. Katrin was very near to penetrating the mystery even now, but she said nothing except those somewhat ostentatious congratulations to all parties on the fact that Miss Eelen was there, which were designed to show the growing conviction that Miss Eelen was not there at all. Beenie was quite quick enough to perceive this, but she exercised much control over herself, and made no signs before Dougal. He was chiefly occupied by the address to Rory which Lily had made, which struck him as an excellent joke, and which he repeated to himself from time to time, with a laugh which came from the depths of his being. “She said till him: ‘Ye can throw me the morn, and welcome, if ye’ll go canny the day.’ Losh, what a spirit she has, that lassie, and the fun in her! ‘Go canny the day, and ye can throw me, if ye like, the morn.’ And Rory to take it a’ in like a Christian!” He laughed till he held his sides, and then he said feebly: “It’ll be the death of me.”
The joke did not strike the women as so brilliant. “I hope he’ll no take her at her word,” said Beenie.
“Na, na, he’ll no take her at her word: he’s ower much of a gentleman; but if he does, you’ll see she’ll stand it and never a word in her head. That’s what I call real spirit, feared at nothing. ‘Go canny the day, and you can throw me, if you like, the morn.’ I think I never heard any thing so funny in a’ my born days.”
“You’re easy pleased,” said his wife, though she was quite inclined to consider Lily’s speeches as brilliant, and herself as the flower of human kind, but to let a man suppose that he was the discoverer of all this was not to be thought of. She communicated, however, some of her suspicions to Dougal, for want of any other confidant, when they were alone in the stillness of their chamber. “I have my doubts,” said Katrin, “that it was nae surprise to her at a’ to find the gentleman, and that it was him that was the Miss Eelen that met her at the auld brig.”
“Him that was Miss Eelen? And how could he be Miss Eelen, a muckle man?” said Dougal.
“Oh, ye gowk!” said his wife, and she put back her discoveries into her bosom, and said no more.
Lily was very restless next day until she was able to get away on her charitable mission. “I must go now,” she said, “to help to take care of him, or Helen will have no time for her other business, and she has so much to do.”
“You maun take care and no find another gentleman with a broken foot,” said Katrin; “you mightn’t be able to manage Rory so well a second time.”
“Oh, I am not afraid of Rory,” the girl cried. “I just speak to him, as Dougal does, in his ear.”
“Mind you what you’ve promised him, Miss Lily,” said that authority, chuckling; “he is to cowp you over his head, if he likes, the day.”
“He’ll not do that!” cried Lily confidently, waving her hand to the assembled household, who were standing outside the door to see her start. What a diversion she was, with her comings and goings, her adventures and mishaps, to that good pair! How dull it must have been for them before Lily came to excite their curiosity and brighten their sense of humor. Dougal returned to his work, shaking once more with a laugh that went down to his boots and thrilled him all over, saying to himself: “He’s ower much of a gentleman to take her at her word;” while Katrin stood shading her eyes with her hand, and looking wistfully after the young creature in her confidence and gayety of youth. “Eh, but I hope the lad’s worthy of her,” was what Katrin said.
