uture Countess of Glenmore, mayhap?" I suggested.

"I'm not meaning any such thing, and it's perhaps not becoming for me
to explain what I do mean; but whether I say it of myself or 'tis said
of me in the Glasgow Sentinel, it makes little differ, for I have the
verse-making, and 'tis more to me than lands or titles.

"Aye," she said, after a pause, with a laugh as though making fun of
her conceit of herself, "I have the genius----"

At the end of the meal, before she left us, bewildered by her vivacity
and charm, she stopped at the door.

"Am I nice?" she asked.

"Very," said Danvers and I.

"And will ye give me," she asked, as a child might have done, "the
thousand pounds for Father Michel?"

"I will not," I answered, the yielding in me showing through the words.

Danvers saw his chance and took it with the spur.

"I will," he said, going toward her to open the door, but it looked
more as though he meant to take her in his arms, "I will, Nancy."

She looked at him with a softness in her eyes.

"Thank you, Danvers," she said, and the glance made me think that, even
did I allow such a manifest impossibility, he could never have invested
money in any way to bring him a richer return.

It was a task beyond me to get sensible talk from him with Nancy
waiting in the moonlight, a moonlight fragrant with honeysuckle and
climbing roses; and I bade him to be off to her; and I opened the
papers which had come by a late post.

I heard a merry talk between them as Huey came in to say that the white
night-flowers were in bloom by the fountain, and I went off with him to
have a look at them. As I came back I turned into the path which led to
the porch, intending to tell them of these wonderful blooms, when I saw
the two of them on the steps, standing near together, and Danvers's
arms were around the girl he loved, and he was looking down into her
eyes with rapture in his fond, handsome face, and I heard him say:

"When, when, _when_?"

"When do you want it?" she asked.

"When do I want it! Now, to-night," and he drew her lips to his.

"Wife!" he said.

* * * * *

When I reentered the library I found it occupied by Sandy, who had
walked across country from his own place with some news concerning the
whisky tax. As we sat in dispute over it, upward of an hour later, I
heard Nancy go to her room without coming in to wish us a good night,
and a second later Danvers Carmichae