s confirmed that, whether he
wanted Barrie or not, he was deliberately standing aside in my favour,
giving me my "chance"--perhaps to test Barrie or me--or both. Who could
tell? Not I. Somerled is hard to read, even for a professional
character-vivisectionist.

"Are you too much excited, and taken up with thoughts of your mother, to
care about all this?" I asked the girl.

She admitted that she was excited, and perhaps a little absent-minded;
but "all this," as I called it, was too wonderful not to capture her
interest in spite of everything.

"Think of Queen Mary and her four Maries, and Darnley, and Rizzio, and
Bothwell, and John Knox passing along as we pass now, on their way up to
Holyrood?" said I.

"Yes. Oh, yes! I _do_ think of them," she answered obediently, her eyes
straying into the shadows of wynd or close, or tracing out the detail of
some carved gargoyle on an old facade.

"Only you think of yourself more----"

"Not myself exactly. But----"

"What then?"

"Well--one thinks of queer things in a place like this, full of romances
and--and love stories. I was wondering----"

"Yes. Don't be afraid to tell me. We're fellow-authors, you
know--brother and sister of the pen."

"That's it! Brother and sister, aren't we? How nice!"

"Of the pen," I amended hastily.

"Story writers must know all about love," she hesitated.

"We do," I encouraged her to go on.

"Then how, if you were writing a story (I'm thinking I may want to do
one), would you make a girl sure whether she'd fallen in love with
somebody?"

"I should make her," I answered cautiously, with an earthquake in my
heart, "I should make her feel--er--a sort of electric thrill when he
touched her, or looked into her eyes. I should make her feel that
nothing was worth doing unless the man was with her."

"I know!" the girl murmured. "She would feel, wouldn't she, as if he
_must_ be there--as if she just couldn't go on living if he weren't."

"That's it," I said. "You've described it graphically."

She regarded me with sudden suspicion. "Thank you very much," she
replied primly. "I'll take your advice and have it like that in my
story, if I ever write it. What a _wonderful_ old street this is! It's
full of ghosts of kings and queens, and noblemen and great ladies, and
soldiers and robbers, every one of them more important than the people
we see."

I couldn't tempt her back to the dangerous subject and soon I prudently
ceased to try. But