mehow it seems my business to take care of you."

"Like Kelpie?" said Clementina, with a merrier smile than he had ever seen
on her face before.

"Yes, my lady," answered Malcolm: "if to do for you all and the best you
will permit me to do be to take care of you like Kelpie, then so it is."

Clementina gave a little sigh.

"Mind you don't scruple, my lady, to give what orders you please. It will
be _your_ fishing-boat for to-night."

Clementina bowed her head in acknowledgment.

"And now, my lady," Malcolm went on, "just look about you for a moment.
See this great vault of heaven, full of golden light raining on trees and
flowers--every atom of air shining. Take the whole into your heart, that
you may feel the difference at night, my lady--when the stars, and neither
sun nor moon, will be in the sky, and all the flowers they shine on will
be their own flitting, blinking, swinging, shutting and opening
reflections in the swaying floor of the ocean--when the heat will be gone,
and the air clean and clear as the thoughts of a saint."

Clementina did as he said, and gazed above and around her on the glory of
the summer day overhanging the sweet garden, and on the flowers that had
just before been making her heart ache with their unattainable secret. But
she thought with herself that if Malcolm and she but shared it with a
common heart as well as neighbored eyes, gorgeous day and ethereal night,
or snow-clad wild and sky of stormy blackness, were alike welcome to her
spirit.

As they talked they wandered up the garden, and had drawn near the spot
where, in the side of the glen, was hollowed the cave of the hermit. They
now turned toward the pretty arbor of moss that covered its entrance, each
thinking the other led, but Malcolm not without reluctance. For how
horribly and unaccountably had he not been shaken, the only time he ever
entered it, at sight of the hermit! The thing was a foolish wooden figure,
no doubt, but the thought that it still sat over its book in the darkest
corner of the cave, ready to rise and advance with outstretched hand to
welcome its visitor, had, ever since then, sufficed to make him shudder.
He was on the point of warning Clementina lest she too should be worse
than startled, when he was arrested by the voice of John Jack, the old
gardener, who came stooping after them, looking a sexton of flowers.

"Ma'colm, Ma'colm!" he cried, and crept up wheezing.--"I beg yer
leddyship's pardon, my led