he called out to the
figures now appearing like jackdaws at the top of the tower, "we are
going straight home. Follow us as soon as you like. Yes, it must be
so," he answered to the slight resistance she made. "They must all take
care of themselves. I mean to take care of you."

Which he did, wrapping her well in the half of his plaid, drawing her
hand under his arm and holding it there--holding it close and warm at
his heart all the way along the Scores and across the Links, scarcely
speaking a single word until they reached the garden gate. Even there
he held it still.

"I see your girls coming, so I shall leave you. You are warm now, are
you not?"

"Quite warm."

"Good-night, then. Stay. Tell me"--he spoke rapidly, and with much
agitation--"tell me just one thing, and I will never trouble you again.
Why did you not answer a letter I wrote to you seventeen years ago?"

"I never got any letter. I never had one word from you after the Sunday
you bade me good-by, promising to write."

"And I did write," cried he, passionately. "I posted it with my own
hands. You should have got it on the Tuesday morning."

She leaned against the laurel bush, that fatal laurel bush, and in a few
breathless words told him what David had said about the hidden letter.

"It must have been my letter. Why did you not tell me this before?"

"How could I? I never knew you had written. You never said a word. In
all these years you have never said a single word."

Bitterly, bitterly he turned away. The groan that escaped him--a man's
groan over his lost life--lost, not wholly through fate alone--was such
as she, the woman whose portion had been sorrow, passive sorrow only,
never forgot in all her days.

"Don't mind it," she whispered--"don't mind it. It is so long past now."

He made no immediate answer, then said,

"Have you no idea what was in the letter?"

"No."

"It was to ask you a question, which I had determined not to ask just
then, but I changed my mind. The answer, I told you, I should wait for
in Edinburgh seven days; after that, I should conclude you meant No, and
sail. No answer came, and I sailed."

He was silent. So was she. A sense of cruel fatality came over her.
Alas! those lost years, that might have been such happy years! At length
she said, faintly, "Forget it. It was not your fault."

"It was my fault. If not mine, you were still yourself--I ought never to
have let you go. I ought