ex to her state of mind.

'Well, if I admit I was in the wrong all the time, though I really, upon
my word, don't know very well what the row was about, will you forgive
me?' he asked in his most irresistible manner, which was so far
successful that the first approach to a smile he had seen since they met
now appeared on her lips.

'You know very well what it was all about; you have not forgotten a word
that passed, any more than I have,' she answered. 'But you ought to have
written all the same. I am generous enough to admit, however, that you
had more reason on your side than I was induced to admit that night. The
experiment I tried has not been a success. Have you heard that Lizzie
Hepburn has run away from us?'

He swallowed the choking sensation in his throat, and answered, with
what indifference he could command,--

'Yes, I heard it.'

'And is that why you have come?' she asked, with a keen, curious glance
at him,--'to crow over my downfall That is not generous in the least.'

'My darling, how can you think me capable of such meanness? Would it not
be more charitable to think I came to condole and sympathise with you?'

'It would, of course,' she admitted, with a sigh; 'but I am rather
suspicious of everybody. I am afraid I am not at all in a wholesome
frame of mind.'

She looked so lovely as she uttered these words, her sweet face wearing
a somewhat pensive, troubled look, that her lover felt that nothing
would ever induce him to give her up. They had now left the town
behind, and were on the brow of the hill where four roads meet. To the
right stood the cosy homestead of Mossgiel, and to the left the whole
expanse of lovely country, hill and field and wood, which had so often
filled the soul of Burns with the lonely rapture of the poet's soul.
Gladys never passed up that way without thinking of him, and it seemed
to her sometimes that she shared with him that deep, yearning depression
of soul which found a voice in the words--

'Man was made to mourn.'

The road was quite deserted. Its grassy slopes were white with the
gowan, and in the low ragged hedges there were clumps of sweet-smelling
hawthorn. All the fields were green and lovely with the promise which
summer crowns and autumn reaps; and it was all so lovely a world that
there seemed in it no room for care or sadness or any dismal thing.
Being thus alone, with no witness to their happiness but the birds and
the bees, the pair of lovers ought