of him when he was gone.

And his love gave to him a gay gold ring
With three shining diamonds set therein;
Oh, his love gave to him this gay gold ring,
Of virtue and value above all thing.'

A light dawned upon me! The silver mystery, then, was intended for a
wand--and a very pretty way of making love to an American girl, too, to
call it a 'sceptre of rule over fair Scotland'; and the three birds were
three singing laverocks 'to mind her of him when he was gone'!

But the real Hynde Horn in the dear old ballad had a truelove who was
not captious and capricious and cold like Francesca. His love gave him a
gay gold ring--

'Of virtue and value above all thing.'

Yet stay: behind the ballad book flung heedlessly on my desk was--what
should it be but the little morocco case, empty now, in which our
Francesca keeps her dead mother's engagement ring--the mother who died
when she was a wee child. Truly a very pretty modern ballad to be sung
in these unromantic, degenerate days!

Francesca came in at the door behind me, saw her secret reflected in my
tell-tale face, saw the sympathetic moisture in my eyes, and, flinging
herself into my willing arms, burst into tears.

"O Pen, dear, dear Pen, I am so miserable and so happy; so afraid that
he won't come back, so frightened for fear that he will! I sent him away
because there were so many lions in the path, and I didn't know how
to slay them. I thought of my f-father; I thought of my c-c-country. I
didn't want to live with him in Scotland, I knew that I couldn't live
without him in America, and there I was! I didn't think I was s-suited
to a minister, and I am not; but oh! this p-particular minister is so
s-suited to me!" and she threw herself on the sofa and buried her head
in the cushions.

She was so absurd even in her grief that I had hard work to keep from
smiling.

"Let us talk about the lions," I said soothingly. "But when did the
trouble begin? When did he speak to you?"

"After the tableau last night; but of course there had been
other--other--times--and things."

"Of course. Well?"

"He had told me a week before that he should go away for a while, that
it made him too wretched to stay here just now; and I suppose that was
when he got the silver wand ready for me. It was meant for the Jean of
the poem, you know. Of course he would not put my own name on a gift
like that."

"You don't think he had it made for Jean Dalziel in the first place