ffairs, Littlefarm.

"Robin," said Alexander, "manages so well that he'll grow wealthy!"

"Oh no! He manages well, but he'll never grow wealthy outside! But
inside he has great riches."

_"Does she love him, then?"_ It poured fear into his heart. A magician
with a sword--with a great, evil, written-upon creese like that
hanging at Black Hill--was here before the palace.

"Do you love him?" asked Alexander, and asked it with so straight a
simplicity that Elspeth Barrow took no offense.

She looked at him, and those strange smiles played about her lips.
"Robin is a fairy man," she said. "He has ower little of struggle save
with his rhymes," and left him to make what he could of that.

"She is heart-free," he thought, but still he feared and boded.

Elspeth rose from the grass, stepped from beneath the blooming tree.
"I must be going. It wears toward noon."

Together they left the flower-set cape. The laird of Glenfernie looked
back upon it.

"_Heaven sent a sample down._ You come here when you wish? You walk
about with the spring and summer days?"

"Aye, when my work's done. Gilian and I love the greenwood."

He gave her the narrow path, but kept beside her on stone and dead
leaves and mossy root. Though he was so large of frame, he moved with
a practised, habitual ease, as far as might be from any savor of
clumsiness. He had magnetism, and to-day he drew like a planet in
glow. Now he looked at the woman beside him, and now he looked
straight ahead with kindled eyes.

Elspeth walked with slightly quickened breath, with knitted brows. The
laird of Glenfernie was above her in station, though go to the
ancestors and blood was equal enough! It carried appeal to a young
woman's vanity, to be walking so, to feel that the laird liked well
enough to be where he was. She liked him, too. Glenfernie House was
talked of, talked of, by village and farm and cot, talked of, talked
of, year by year--all the Jardines, their virtues and their vices,
what they said and what they did. She had heard, ever since she was a
bairn, that continual comment, like a little prattling burn running
winter and summer through the dale. So she knew much that was true of
Alexander Jardine, but likewise entertained a sufficient amount of
misapprehension and romancing. Out of it all came, however, for the
dale, and for the women at White Farm who listened to the burn's
voice, a sense of trustworthiness. Elspeth, walking by Glenfernie,
felt kind