indulging a cantrip like her mother's
daughter. Ask her--ask her--oh! what need I be telling you? If you have
not the words in your heart I need not be putting them in your mouth.
Run away with you now!" and she pushed him to the door like a child that
had been caressed and counselled.

He was for going eagerly without a word more, but she cried him back.
For a moment she clung to his arm as if she was reluctant to part with
him.

"Oh!" she cried, laughing, and yet with tears in her voice, "a
bonny-like man to be asking her without having anything to offer."

He would have interrupted her, but she would not let him.

"Go your ways," she told him, "and bring her back with you if you can.
Miss Mary has something in a stocking foot, and no long need for it."

CHAPTER XXXIII--THE PROMISE

When Gilian came down the stair and to the mouth of the pend close, he
stood with some of the shyness of his childhood that used to keep him
swithering there with a new suit on, uneasy for the knowledge that the
colour and cut of it would be the talk of the town as soon as it was
seen, and that some one would come and ask ofthand if Miss Mary was
still making-down from the Paymaster's waistcoats. It was for that he
used at last to show a new suit on the town by gentle degrees, the first
Sunday the waistcoat, the next Sunday the waistcoat and trousers, and
finally the complete splendour. Now he felt kenspeckle, not in any suit
of material clothes but in a droll sense of nakedness. He had told his
love and adventure in a place where walls heard and windows peered,
and a rumour out of the ordinary went on the wind into every close and
soared straight to the highest tenement--even to the garret rooms. He
felt that the women at the wells, very busy, as they pretended, over
their boynes and stoups, would whisper about him as he passed, without
looking up from their occupation.

Down the street towards the church there was scarcely any one to be seen
except the children out for the mid-day airing from Brooks's school, and
old Brooks himself going over to Kate Bell's for his midday waters with
a daundering step as if he had no special object, and might as readily
be found making for the quay or the coffee-house. The children were
noisy in the playground, the boys playing at port-the-helm, a foolish
pastime borrowed in its parlance and its rule from the seafarers who
frequented the harbour, and the girls more sedately played peeveral-a