e on one side. And the
woman who has enough of her husband's kisses and his babies at her
breast has little time to write verses or think of other men."

With these words still ringing in my ears I rapped at Nancy's door on
my way to bed, to find her sitting by a glaring light with the
everlasting Burns book in her hand. I was a bit dashed in spirit by her
occupation, for it seemed unnatural that a girl should be spending the
time immediately after her betrothal in such an employ, and I affected
a gaiety I was far from feeling.

"Is it to Nancy Stair or the possible Countess of Glenmore that I
speak?"

She stood by the table, her finger still marking her place in the book.

"Dandy told you, then?" she asked.

"Told us!" I echoed. "It's my opinion he'll tell the town-crier
to-night and have it in all the prints of the realm within the week."

"He told you just what the understanding was?"

I repeated what he had said, and she nodded at the end in acquiescence.

"You see," she said, coming toward me and putting her head on my
shoulder, "I'm not sure of myself. My mind's ill redd up for marriage
with any one. I've had too much freedom, perhaps; and while one side of
my nature, probably the strongest one, loves Danvers Carmichael, I am
drawn to the writer of these lines, this Burns man, in a way I can not
tell; and at the very foot of the matter I am mightily taken up with
the power of John Montrose. It's no highly moral, is it?" she asked,
with an amused smile, "to feel ye could be in love with two--three men
at once? But my nature's many sided, and on one of these sides I find a
most 'treacherous inclination' toward his Grace of Borthwicke."

CHAPTER XII

I MEET A GREAT MAN

"With knowledge so vast and with judgment so strong
No man with the half of them e'er could go wrong;
With passion so potent, and fancies so bright,
No man with the half of them e'er could go right."

I passed as miserable a night as my worst enemy could have wished and
was up at the dawning for a jaunt in the open. The gowans so white and
bonny were swinging their dewy heads in the morning wind; the sea-fog
was lifting skyward, and whether the message came from them I can not
say, but a mystical white word floated between me and my troubled
thoughts of Nancy--a word which means the changing of baser metal into
pure gold, the returning of the balance to nature, the fine adjustment
of spirit to mind and body--