ars, but
yet with a smile on her face that never sat so sweetly there as when
her feelings mingled. He started as at the voice of a ghost, and hung
hesitating on the threshold till she stepped from her gloomy corner into
the light of the afternoon. As he saw her where a moment before was
a vacancy he could scarcely believe his eyes. But he did not hesitate
long. In an instant, encouraged by her tears and smiles, he had an arm
round her.

"Nan! Nan!" he cried, "I have found you! I never was so happy in my
life!"

For a moment she did not put him off; and he took her hesitation for
content.

"What did it mean? Were you flying from me?" he asked.

All her hardships, all the wrong and degradation leaped into her
recollection. She withdrew herself firmly from that embrace that might
be the embrace of love and possession or of simple companionship in
trial.

"I would never have been here but for you," said she. "Did you--did you
pay much?"

"Ah!" he cried ruefully, "there's where you do me injustice! Did you
know me so little--and indeed you know me but little enough, more's my
sorrow--did you know me so little that you must believe me a savage to
be guilty of a crime like that? Must I be saying that before God I did
not know that my father and--and--"

"--And my father."

"--And your father, though I would be the last to charge him, were
scheming in any commercial way on my behalf? Come, come, I was not
blate, was I? the last time we were together; my impudence was not in
the style of a man who would go the other way about a wooing, was it?"

"Then you did not know?" She blushed and paused.

"I knew nothing," he protested. "I knew nothing but that I loved you,
and you know that too if telling can inform you. I told my father that,
and he was well enough pleased, and I could not guess he would make a
fool of me and a victim of you in my absence."

She stood trembling to this revelation of his innocence, and, once more
the confident lover, Young Islay tried to take her in his arms.

She ran from him, not the young lady of Edinburgh but a merry-hearted
child, making for the side of Little Fox, the air as she went flapping
her gown till it beat gaily like a flag. She ran light-footed, laughing
in her sudden ease of mind, and on the more distant of the two slopes
of Cruach-an-Lochain, antlers rose inquiring; then a red deer looked and
listened, forgetting to crop the poor grass at his feet.

For a second or two