h to outshine his rivals, may pride himself in the possession of
some superior recommendations which have achieved a triumph. Were he to
look better to it, he might detect something, too, in the force of
resources. At best, a few hundred pounds will turn the scale; for he is
by all that a better man; and the trained eye of town beauties has a
strange responsive twinkle in the glare of the one thing needful. In the
remote and beautiful parts of a romantic country, things are otherwise
ordered: affection there, is as the mountain flower to the gallipot
rose; and it is a mockery to tell us that the difference is only
perceptible to those who are weak enough to be romantic. A doughty
warrior would recognise and acknowledge the difference, and fight a
great deal better too, after he had blubbered over a mountain or glen
born love for a creature who would look upon him as the soul of the
retreat, and hang on his breast in the outpourings of Nature's feelings.
That young Whitecraigs appreciated the triumph he had secured, there can
be no reason to doubt. He had been within the drying atmosphere of
towns, and had sung and waltzed, probably, with a round hundred of
creatures who understood the passion, much as Audrey understood
poetry--deeming it honest enough, but yet a composition made up of the
elements of side glances, arias, smorzando-sighs, and quadrilles. With
Alice Scott on his bosom, the quiet glen as their retreat, the green
umbrageous woods their defence, its birds as their musicians, and the
wimpling Lyne as the speaking Naiad, he forgot, if he did not despise,
the scenes he had left. She flew from him now no longer. The fowler had
succeeded to captivate, not intentionally to kill.

Two years passed over in this intercourse. There was no secret about it.
The dame was well apprised of their proceeding; and the open frankness
of the youth dispelled all the fears of wrong which the innocence of the
daughter, undefended by experience, might have scarcely guaranteed to
one who, at least, had heard something of the ways of the world. The
income from Whitecraigs, somewhere about seven hundred a-year, was more
than sufficient for the expenditure of the older Haystons; and Hector,
at this time, did not seem inclined to alter the line of life followed
by his fathers. He had not spoken of marriage to the mother; but he had
not hesitated to breathe into the ear of Alice all that was necessary to
lead her to the conclusion, to whi