t was to be. Again and again he had touched on
marriage; again and again been driven back into indistinctness by a
memory of Lord Hermiston. And Kirstie had been swift to understand and
quick to choke down and smother the understanding; swift to leap up in
flame at a mention of that hope, which spoke volumes to her vanity and
her love, that she might one day be Mrs. Weir of Hermiston; swift, also,
to recognise in his stumbling or throttled utterance the death-knell of
these expectations, and constant, poor girl! in her large-minded
madness, to go on and to reck nothing of the future. But these
unfinished references, these blinks in which his heart spoke, and his
memory and reason rose up to silence it before the words were well
uttered, gave her unqualifiable agony. She was raised up and dashed down
again bleeding. The recurrence of the subject forced her, for however
short a time, to open her eyes on what she did not wish to see; and it
had invariably ended in another disappointment. So now again, at the
mere wind of its coming, at the mere mention of his father's name--who
might seem indeed to have accompanied them in their whole moorland
courtship, an awful figure in a wig with an ironical and bitter smile,
present to guilty consciousness--she fled from it head down.

"Ye havena told me yet," she said, "who was it spoke?"

"Your aunt for one," said Archie.

"Auntie Kirstie?" she cried. "And what do I care for my Auntie Kirstie?"

"She cares a great deal for her niece," replied Archie, in kind reproof.

"Troth, and it's the first I've heard of it," retorted the girl.

"The question here is not who it is, but what they say, what they have
noticed," pursued the lucid schoolmaster. "That is what we have to think
of in self-defence."

"Auntie Kirstie, indeed! A bitter, thrawn auld maid that's fomented
trouble in the country before I was born, and will be doing it still, I
daur say, when I'm deid! It's in her nature; it's as natural for her as
it's for a sheep to eat."

"Pardon me, Kirstie, she was not the only one," interposed Archie. "I
had two warnings, two sermons, last night, both most kind and
considerate. Had you been there, I promise you you would have grat, my
dear! And they opened my eyes. I saw we were going a wrong way."

"Who was the other one?" Kirstie demanded.

By this time Archie was in the condition of a hunted beast. He had come,
braced and resolute; he was to trace out a line of conduct for th