y, for he was no longer looking at her, no longer, indeed,
conceding her so little as the light of the lantern, which he had placed
on the ground, so that its light was dissipated around, while none of it
reached the top of the ladder.

"Well," she repeated sharply, for he had not answered.

He looked up with a start. "Are you not coming?" he said, with a tone to
suggest that he was waiting impatiently.

She had the window wide open now; she leaned out on her arms ready to
descend; the last rung of the ladder was a foot lower than the sill
of the window; she looked in perplexity at her cavalier, for it was
impossible to put much of grace into an emergence and a descent like
this.

"I am just coming," she said, but still she made no other move, and he
held up the lantern for her to sec the better.

"Well, be careful!" he advised, and he thought how delightful it was to
have the right to say so much.

"O Gilian!" she said helplessly, "you are far from gleg."

He gazed ludicrously uncomprehending at her, and in his sense of almost
conjugal right to the girl failed to realise her delicacy.

"Go round to the barn and make sure that Duncan is not moving; he's the
only one I fear," she said. "Leave the lantern."

He did as he was told; he put the lantern on the ground; he went round
again to the barn, put his head in, and satisfied himself that his
seaman was still musical aloft. Then he hurried back. He found the
lantern swinging on Nan's finger, and her composed upon the ground, to
which she had made a speedy descent whenever he had disappeared.

"Oh! I wanted to help you," said he.

"Did you?" said she, looking for a sign of the humorist, but he was as
solemn as a sermon.

They might have been extremely sedate in Miss Simpson's school in
Edinburgh, but at that moment Miss Nan would have forgiven some apparent
appreciation of her cleverness in getting him out of the way while she
came feet first through a window. They stood for a moment in expectancy,
as if something was going to happen, she still holding the lantern,
trembling a little, as it might be with the cold, he with her bundle
under his arm pressed affectionately.

"And--and--do we just go on?" she asked suggestively.

"The quicker the better," said he, but he made no movement to depart,
for his mind was in the house of Maam, and he felt the father's sorrow
and alarm at an empty bed, a daughter gone.

She put out an arm, flushing in the dark as she