rue affection, when once it had confessed
itself. So she shrank from Bourhope, slipped away from, and managed to
avoid him. He was puzzled and vexed, and almost exasperated by doubts as
to whether she cared for or wished to accept his notice and regards.
Little brown Chrissy taught the bold Yeoman a lesson in her own quiet
way. She slowly forced upon him the conviction that any gifts or
attainments of his--the prosperous, cultivated farmer laird--were as
dross compared with the genius and acquirements of Chrissy Hunter, whom
many short-sighted men called insignificant and plain amid the poverty
and cares of Blackfaulds. Bourhope was not radically mercenary: he had
no certainty that his superiority in worldly estate would secure the
strange good upon which he set his heart, and he was at once stimulated
and incensed by her indifference to his advances. So he had no
communication with Chrissy, apart from a demure interchange of words in
general conversation, for three days before the grand review and the
ball, except in a single incident of the pipe-claying of his belts.

The gentlemen of the old yeomanry who had not servants to do it for
them, did their own pipe-claying, and might generally be seen doing it
very indifferently to the accompaniment of private whistling or social
bawling to each other over adjacent walls in the back courts and greens
of Priorton. Bourhope was one day doing his rather gloomily in the back
court, and succeeding very ill, when Chrissy, who saw him from a window,
could endure it no longer. Chrissy was not what most intellectual women
are described as being--an abstracted, scared being, with two left
hands. The exigency of her situation as eldest daughter at Blackfaulds
had rendered her as handy as other girls, and only unlike them in being
a great deal more fertile in resource. How could such a woman stand and
see Bourhope destroying his accoutrements, and in danger of smearing
himself from head to foot with pipe-clay? Chrissy came tripping out, and
addressed him with some sharpness--"That is not right, Mr. Spottiswoode;
you will never whiten your belt in that way, you will only soil the rest
of your clothes. I watched the old sergeant doing it next-door for Major
Christison. Look here:" and she took the article out of his hands, and
proceeded smartly to clean it. Poor Bourhope bowed to her empire,
though he would much rather their positions had been reversed: he would
rather a thousand times ha