able and even pleasant," said he, "a dwelling where
age and bitterness had their abode."

"Faith, you're not so blate as I thought you!" she said, setting aside
the last of her affected shy simplicity.

"Blate!" he repeated, "I would not have thought that was my failing. Am
I not cracking away to you like an old wife?"

"Just to hide the blateness of you," she answered. "You may go to great
depths with hills and heughs and mists--and possibly with women too when
you get the chance, but, my dear Gilian, you're terribly shallow to any
woman with an eye in her head."

"Did you say 'Gilian'?" he asked, stopping and looking at her with a
high colour.

"Did I?" she repeated, biting her lips. "What liberty!"

"No, no," he cried----

"I thought myself young enough to venture it; but, of course, if you
object----"

He looked at her helplessly, realising that she was making fun of him,
and she laughed. All her assurance was back to her, she knew the young
gentleman was one she could twist round her little finger.

"Well, well," she went on after a silence, "you seem poorly provided
with small talk. In Edinburgh, now, a young man with your chances would
be making love to me by this time."

He stared at her aghast. "But, but----"

"But I would not permit it, of course not! We were brought up very
particularly in Miss Simpson's, I can assure you." This with a prim
tightening of her lips and a severity that any other than our dreamer
would have understood. To Nan there came a delight in this play with
an intelligence she knew so keen, though different from her own. It was
with a holiday feeling she laughed and shone, mischievously eyeing
him and trying him with badinage as they penetrated deeper into the
policies.

They reached the Lady's Linn, but did not repeat old history to the
extent of seating themselves on the banks, though Gilian half suggested
it in a momentary boldness.

"No, no," said she. "We were taught better than that in Miss Simpson's.
And fancy the risks of rheumatism! You told me one of Gillesbeg Aotram's
stories here; what was it again?"

He repeated the tale of the King of Knapdale's Daughter. She listened
attentively, sometimes amused at his earnestness, that sat on him
gaukily, sometimes serious enough, touched with the poetry he could put
into the narrative.

"It is a kind of gruesome fable," she said when he was done, and she
shuddered slightly. "The other brother was Death, wasn't he? When