"Poor little soul, with the blood pouring from her heart and her brown
hair spread over her dead father's breast!" I stopped, because a faint
memory came back to me. "Mine," I stammered--"mine--how strange!--had
a great stain on the embroideries of her dress. She looked at it--and
looked. She looked as if she didn't like it--as if she didn't understand
how it came there. She covered it with ferns and bluebells."

I felt as if I were being drawn away into a dream. I made a sudden
effort to come back. I ceased rubbing my forehead and dropped my hand,
sitting upright.

"I must ask Angus and Jean to tell me about her," I said. "Of course,
they must have known. I wonder why I never thought of asking questions
before."

It was a strange look I met when I involuntarily turned toward him--such
an absorbed, strange, tender look!

I knew he sat quite late in the library that night, talking to Angus
after his mother and I went to our rooms. Just as I was falling asleep
I remember there floated through my mind a vague recollection of
what Angus had said to me of asking his advice about something; and I
wondered if he would reach the subject in their talk, or if they would
spend all their time in poring over manuscripts and books together.

The moor wore its most mysterious look when I got up in the early
morning. It had hidden itself in its softest snows of white, swathing
mist. Only here and there dark fir-trees showed themselves above it, and
now and then the whiteness thinned or broke and drifted. It was as I had
wanted him to see it--just as I had wanted to walk through it with him.

We had met in the hall as we had planned, and, wrapped in our plaids
because the early morning air was cold, we tramped away together. No one
but myself could ever realize what it was like. I had never known that
there could be such a feeling of companionship in the world. It would
not have been necessary for us to talk at all if we had felt silent. We
should have been saying things to each other without words. But we did
talk as we walked--in quiet voices which seemed made quieter by the
mist, and of quiet things which such voices seemed to belong to.

We crossed the park to a stile in a hedge where a path led at once on to
the moor. Part of the park itself had once been moorland, and was dark
with slender firs and thick grown with heather and broom. On the moor
the mist grew thicker, and if I had not so well known the path we might
have