g tackle, was wafted through the open window and cut
athwart the dry speech of the lawyer. My eyes found her and lingered on
the soft curves, the rose-leaf colouring, the eager face framed in a
sunlit aureola of radiant hair. Already my mind had a trick of imagining
her the mistress of the Grange. Did she sit for a moment in the seat that
had been my mother's my heart sang; did she pluck a posy or pour a cup of
tea 'twas the same. "If I thought of marrying----" Well, 'twas a thing to
be considered one day--when I came back from the wars.

CHAPTER VI

IN THE MATTER OF A KISS

It may be guessed that the music of the gray morn when we started found a
ready echo in my heart. The whistle of a plover cut the breaking day, the
meadow larks piped clear above us in chorus with the trilling of the
thrush, the wimpling burn tinkled its song, and the joy that took me
fairly by the throat was in tune with all of them. For what does a lover
ask but to be one and twenty, to be astride a willing horse, and to be
beside the one woman in the world for him? Sure 'tis heaven enough to
watch the colour come and go in her face, to hear the lilt of her voice,
and to see the changing light in her eye. What though at times we were shy
as the wild rabbit, we were none the less happy for that. In our hearts
there bubbled a childlike gaiety; we skipped upon the sunlit hilltops of
life.

And here was the one drop of poison in the honey of my cup: that I was
wearing an abominable misfit of a drab-coloured suit of homespun more
adapted to some village tradesman than to a young cavalier of fashion, for
on account of the hue and cry against me I had pocketed my pride and was
travelling under an incognito. Nor did it comfort me one whit that Aileen
also was furbished up in sombre gray to represent my sister, for she
looked so taking in it that I vow 'twas more becoming than her finery. Yet
I made the best of it, and many a good laugh we got from rehearsing our
parts.

I can make no hand at remembering what we had to say to each other, nor
does it matter; in cold type 'twould lose much of its charm. The merry
prattle of her pretty broken English was set to music for me, and the very
silences were eloquent of thrill. Early I discovered that I had not
appreciated fully her mental powers, on account of a habit she had of
falling into a shy silence when several were present. She had a nimble
wit, an alert fancy, and a zest for life as earnest as