h an ice compartment walled in
with asbestos or something scientific. He said that it had been a
present, and he'd promised to bring it with him on this Scottish trip,
which it appears he was ordered to take as a rest cure. On the lid of
the basket, in a conspicuous place, is a silver plate, saying, in
beautiful old English letters, "To Ian Somerled, from his grateful
model," and underneath a monogram "M. M." in the raised heart of an
elaborate marguerite. As we ate ice-cold chicken, salad, and chilled
wild strawberries of the north, Mrs. James began with a gay perkiness to
tease Sir S. about the "grateful model," whose name must surely be
Marguerite; but I put a stop to that. The hour after a wedding at Gretna
Green is no tune for talk of any woman-thing except the bride; and as I
may perhaps never be anybody's real bride, I insisted on my rights. This
carrying on of the Gretna Green game rather scandalized good Mrs. James,
but when she scolded me gently for my "childishness," Sir S. said, "Do
let her be a child as long as she can. It would be well for every one of
us if we kept something of our childhood all our lives. Just now I'm
finding childhood gloriously contagious. I don't know how many years
I've thrown off in two days' time, since this child princess commanded
me to play with her."

This nipped the scolding in its bud (not that I minded it), but I'm sure
dear Mrs. James still thought my bride-game had been played too long,
and she switched the conversation to the real romances of Gretna
Green--so breathlessly thrilling, some of them, that I was ashamed to
hark back to the subject of ourselves. Not that Sir S. wouldn't make a
hero for my romance. I feel that under his quiet, sometimes tired
manner, there's a hidden fire, and I want to find out what he is really
like, if I can. The study of such a man will be more interesting and
even more mysterious than peeping through the keyhole of the garret
door, into what I used to call "fairyland." Already that seems long ago.

No one would guess, who had only seen Mrs. James with Grandma, how much
the little woman knows, or how nicely she can talk, and I blurted this
thought out, before I stopped to reflect that it might sound rude. An
hour passed like five minutes in listening to her story of the Lord
Chancellor's wedding at Gretna, and Lord Westmorland's shooting of
Banker Child's horse, to save his young bride from capture by her
father; the tale of Robert Burns al