vine,
that surrounded the spot, breathed of heaven. The larkspurs stood
around like watchful grenadiers. Lilies and pansies were at their
feet, and the laburnum hung its golden droops above them. All the day
long, the sea was blue and calm, and the waves seemed to roll
themselves asleep upon the shore. At night, there was a full moon
above the water, and in its light the projecting rigging of some ships
lying on it looked like spider webs on the gray firmament. The sun,
and the moon, and the sea were all new, and the whole world was their
own.

Talk of their marriage no longer made trouble, for Christine now
sweetly echoed his hopes and his dreams. She had said "on the
fifteenth of next April, or there-abouts," and Cluny seized and clung
to the positive date. "Let it be the fifteenth," he decided. "I cannot
bear 'there-abouts,' or any other uncertainty."

"The fifteenth might fall on a Sunday."

"Then let it be Sunday. There can be no better day;" and Christine
smiled and lifted her beautiful face, and he wanted to give her a
thousand kisses. For nearly three days all the ancient ecstasies of
love and youth were theirs. I need say no more. The morning redness of
life and love has once tinged us all.

Judith went home the following day. Nothing less than the joys and
sorrows and contentions of the whole village, were sufficient for her
troubled and troubling spirit. Judith had everyone's affairs to look
after, but she gave the supremacy of her attention to Cluny and
Christine. Christine, she said, was a by-ordinary girl. She had
written a poem, and got gude siller for it, and there wasna anither
lass in Culraine, no, nor i' the hale o' Scotland, could do the same
thing.

Christine's first employment was to put her house in perfect order,
then she took out her old fisher dresses, and selected one for the
work before her. She hoped that her effort to take her mother's place
in the kippering shed would put a stop to the fisherwives' opinion
that she was "setting hersel' up aboon them a'." She longed for their
good will, and she had no desire whatever to "tak' her mither's
outstanding place," a fear of which intention some of the older women
professed.

Her first visitor was her brother Norman. He put a stop at once to all
her good and kind intentions. "You mustna go near the kippering," he
said. "I hae heard what must put a stop to that intent. The herrin'
are near by, and may be here tonight. If so be, I will sen