was telling and I was
listening. Whiles, again, we would sit entirely silent, not
communicating even with a look, and tasting pleasure enough in the
sweetness of that neighbourhood. I speak here only for myself. Of what
was in the maid's mind I am not very sure that ever I asked myself; and
what was in my own I was afraid to consider. I need make no secret of it
now, either to myself or to the reader: I was fallen totally in love.
She came between me and the sun. She had grown suddenly taller, as I
say, but with a wholesome growth; she seemed all health, and lightness,
and brave spirits; and I thought she walked like a young deer, and stood
like a birch upon the mountains. It was enough for me to sit near by her
on the deck; and I declare I scarce spent two thoughts upon the future,
and was so well content with what I then enjoyed that I was never at the
pains to imagine any further step; unless perhaps that I would be
sometimes tempted to take her hand in mine and hold it there. But I was
too like a miser of what joys I had, and would venture nothing on a
hazard.

What we spoke was usually of ourselves or of each other, so that if any
one had been at so much pains as overhear us, he must have supposed us
the most egotistical persons in the world. It befell one day when we
were at this practice, that we came on a discourse of friends and
friendship, and I think now that we were sailing near the wind. We said
what a fine thing friendship was, and how little we had guessed of it,
and how it made life a new thing, and a thousand covered things of the
same kind that will have been said, since the foundation of the world,
by young folk in the same predicament. Then we remarked upon the
strangeness of that circumstance, that friends came together in the
beginning as if they were there for the first time, and yet each had
been alive a good while, losing time with other people.

"It is not much that I have done," said she, "and I could be telling you
the five-fifths of it in two-three words. It is only a girl I am, and
what can befall a girl, at all events? But I went with the clan in the
year 'Forty-five. The men marched with swords and firelocks, and some
of them in brigades in the same set of tartan; they were not backward at
the marching, I can tell you. And there were gentlemen from the Low
Country, with their tenants mounted and trumpets to sound, and there was
a grand skirling of war-pipes. I rode on a little Highland h