erhaps worthier, their chance. If you had loved anybody
else I'd have let you alone. But I don't think one of those men made
good. Do you love me, Barrie? Answer me now, as if we were alone
together?"

"Yes," I whispered.

He caught me in his arms, and kissed me on the mouth, holding me close
against his breast.

"Then," he said, "I am your husband. Are you my wife? I ask you before
these witnesses, who know us both."

"I am your wife," I repeated after him.

"This time," he exclaimed, "we are safely married, and not all the world
can part us now."

Basil and Aline went away before we did. Aline said she was going to
Glasgow, to tell Barbara how I had treated them, and to see the man she
was engaged to marry: that it was all a mistake, if not a deliberate
falsehood on my part, about her thinking Ian cared for her. Basil went
with her, not saying anything at all, except:

"Good-bye, Barrie. Some day perhaps you'll understand and forgive me. I
always had a presentiment that I shouldn't be able to bring it off at
the last; that Somerled would cut in and snatch you away from me."

Ian suggested taking me to Carlisle, only eight miles away, to stay with
Grandma until we could have a more conventional wedding. But when I
said, "_Aren't_ we really and truly married, then?" in a frightened
voice, he said, "Of course we are, my darling child--married as fast as
if by book and bell. Nothing can part us. I shall never let you go out
of my sight for five minutes after this--unless you want to go."

"But I don't," I said. And a sudden thought came to me. I told him I
wished he would take me to Sweetheart Abbey. If it had been appropriate
to spend the first night of the heather moon there, as Mrs. James had
said, it would be still more appropriate to spend the first night of the
honeymoon.

We bade the old man of the house good-bye and he shook hands with us
both. Ian gave him something which made him exclaim, "I thank you
kindly, indeed, sir! And I must say, if you'll excuse the liberty, I
never wanted the other gentleman to get her, sir. I felt in my bones
there was something wrong, so I kept on asking questions to delay the
thing. If I hadn't done that, it would all have been fixed up before you
came along."

"If it had been, I should have taken her away from him, anyhow," said
Ian, "because she was my wife, and she couldn't have been his."

"Not _exactly_ your wife, sir," the old man tried to explain, taking him
l