he asked, astonished.

"Dare! dare! Oh dear!" she repeated. "Am I to do the daring and break my
neck perhaps?"

Out flashed the lantern from beneath his plaid and he held it up to the
window. Nan leant over and all his hesitation fled. He had never seen
her more alluring. Her hair had become somehow unfastened, and, without
untidiness, there lay a lock across her brow; all her blood was in her
face, her eyes might indeed have been the flames he had fancied, for
to the appeal of the lantern they flashed back from great and rolling
depths of luminousness. Her lips seemed to have gathered up in sleep the
wealth of a day of kissing. A screen of tartan that she had placed about
her shoulders had slipped aside in her movement at the window and showed
her neck, ivory pale and pulsing.

"Come along, come along!" he cried in an eager whisper, and he put up
his arms, lantern and all, as if she were to jump. Something in his
first look made her pause.

"Do you really want to go?" he asked, and she was drawing her screen
by instinct across her form. An observer, if there had been such, might
well have been amused to see an elopement so conducted. There was still
no sound in the night, except that the cock crew at intervals over in
the cottars. The morning was heavy with dew; the scent of bog-myrtle
drugged the air.

"Do I really want?" she repeated. "Mercy! what a question. It seems
to me that yesterday would have been the best time to ask it. Are you
rueing your bargain?" She looked at him with great dissatisfaction as he
stood at the foot of the ladder, by no means a handsome cavalier, as
he carried his plaid clumsily. He was made all the more eager by her
coldness.

"Come, come!" he cried; "the house will be awake before you are ready,
and I cannot be keeping this lantern lighted for fear some one sees it."

"We are safe for an hour yet, if we cared to waste the time," she said
composedly, "and if you're sure you want it----"

"Want you, Nan," he corrected, "That's a little more like it," she said
to herself, and she dropped the customary bundle at his feet He picked
it up gingerly, as if it were a church relic; that it was a possession
of hers, apparel apparently, made him feel a slight intoxication. No
swithering now; he would carry out the adventure if it led to the end
of the world! He hugged the bundle under his arm, as if it were a
woman, and felt a fictional glow from the touch of it. "Well?" said she
impatientl