pled with the
passing of an influence which, if not sympathetic, may yet have been a
stimulus to us. Something that has been roused in our nature, goes
back into its hidden place with the cause which unhappily called it
out, rivalry, perhaps. It is a whip that may carry you to the top of a
hill when otherwise, tempted by a warm sun and a soft wind, you might
recline on a half-way bank of heather. Ah! it is good to day-dream at
the sun, our Highland sun, which plays hide-and-seek with the sailing
clouds.

But, may be, the incomplete parting is the best, that which has many
things unsaid, silences which are not silent; because it leaves room
for the imagination, lets us gild the picture in the roses of hope.

The going of the Black Colonel had meant a difference for myself
certainly, and also, I could suppose, for Marget and her mother. But
it was a mixture of the two feelings which I have suggested, because,
in a fashion, I had a regard for the man, as well as something else,
and to the ladies of the Dower House he was both the kinsman and the
venturer who wanted to be more. I admired his manly qualities and was
willing to clothe the others in a veil, as long as he did not make that
impossible. They had the bond of family with him, a quiet pride in his
championage of the Stuart side, which had been theirs, and, well, they
wished no more of him. But what, perhaps, we mostly felt, Marget and
I, without daring for a moment to confess as much, was that some
element which kept us apart, and might, unhappily, even divide us, had
passed across the sea to the New World with the Black Colonel.

We began unconsciously, and then, I suspect, noticeably, to grow
closer, to live the vital little things of life nearer to each other,
as it this were natural. That, perhaps, is the most critical period in
the mating of two young people, as you may learn from the delicate
nurturing of Mother Nature herself in the spring-time, when the earth
grows warm. They are so in the thrill of emotion, that they have no
thought for the building of the permanent house of the spirit in which
they are to dwell. But it goes forward about them and otherwise the
prospect would be bleak for them, sad for them, and sadness should not
come to lovers in the honeymoon of their hopes.

"I suppose," Marget said to me one evening while we chatted in the
Dower House and her mother, tempted by the long summer light of the
north, read in the garden, "I su