old it me about twenty
women, and it is always the same. I tell you, you don't know anything at
all about Sheila Mackenzie yet: perhaps you never may. I suppose you
will make a heroine of her, and fall in love with her for a fortnight,
and then go back to London and get cured by listening to the witticisms
of Mrs. Lorraine."

"Thank you very much."

"Oh, I didn't mean to offend you. Some day, no doubt, you will love a
woman for what she is, not for what you fancy her to be; but that is a
piece of good-fortune that seldom occurs to a youth of your age. To
marry in a dream, and wake up six months afterward--that is the fate of
ingenuous twenty-three. But don't you let Mackenzie hear you talk of
marrying Sheila, or he'll have some of his fishermen throw you into Loch
Roag."

"There, now, that _is_ one point I can't understand about her," said
Lavender eagerly. "How can a girl of her shrewdness and good sense have
such a belief in that humbugging old idiot of a father of hers, who
fancies me a political emissary, and plays small tricks to look like
diplomacy? It is always 'My papa can do this,' and 'My papa can do
that,' and 'There is no one at all like my papa.' And she is continually
fondling him, and giving little demonstrations of affection, of which he
takes no more notice than if he were an Arctic bear."

Ingram looked up with some surprise in his face. "You don't mean to say,
Lavender," he said slowly, "that you are already jealous of the girl's
own father?"

He could not answer, for at this moment Sheila, her father and the big
greyhound came up the hill. And again it was Lavender's good fortune to
walk with Sheila across the moorland path they had traversed some little
time before. And now the moon was still higher in the heavens, and the
yellow lane of light that crossed the violet waters of Loch Roag
quivered in a deeper gold. The night-air was scented with the Dutch
clover growing down by the shore. They could hear the curlew whistling
and the plover calling amid that monotonous plash of the waves that
murmured all around the coast. When they returned to the house the
darker waters of the Atlantic and the purple clouds of the west were
shut out from sight, and before them there was only the liquid plain of
Loch Roag, with its pathway of yellow fire, and far away on the other
side the shoulders and peaks of the southern mountains, that had grown
gray and clear and sharp in the beautiful twilight. And this w