rds disappeared from the porch, coming out of the door
near which I stood.

Her hair, in two long plaits, hung almost to her knees, and by the
moonlight I could see the flush of her cheek and the silver sheen of
her eyes as she looked up at me with questioning in her glance, and I
remember now the clutch at my throat which seemed to hold back all I
would say, as I took off my cap and stood before her.

"I love you," I said headily, "I love you, and I want you for my wife,"
and, seeing the highness of the absurdity that my first words to her
should be a proposal of marriage, I cried,

"Oh, my dear! my dear! ye'll think me daft to talk thus; but we men of
Stair go gyte in these affairs. 'Tis love at first sight with us, or
none at all; but if ye'll have me, I'll make ye Lady Stair; and what's
far more, I'll try to make you a happy woman the rest of your days.

"It seems wild enough for me to be talking so," I went on, "to you, who
do not even know my name," and here she interrupted me with a shy
smile.

"Jock!" she said, reaching forth her hand, and the door of heaven
opened, as it seemed.

"How did you know?" I asked.

"Sure," she said, "I listened for it. The other big man called you
that."

"You cared to know?" I whispered, for my arm was around her by this
time, and the world had slipped away.

"Very much."

"And you think you could learn to love me, Marian?"

I felt the little body quiver in my arms, and when she spoke there was
fear in her voice.

"Do you think it is right?" she asked. "Do you think it can be right?
It seems as though for years, for all my life, I had waited for your
coming, and I loved you the minute I saw you--you whom a few hours
agone I did not know to be a living man. Tell me," she went on
excitedly, "you who are a man and of the world, can this be all good?"

"It is as God meant such things to fall," I answered her, "and He deal
so with me as I shall deal with thee."

"But," she persisted, "are you sure you understand? You tell me you are
Lord of Stair, and I've no doubt of it, for truth shines from your
eyes; but what do you ken of me? I who have no name, who was left by
some gipsy folk at the inn door, and whose breeding--what I've of
it--came from a Jacobite priest who teaches by the Cairn Mills."

There was never another voice so full of music, so caressing or so
feminine, as Marian Ingarrach's, none, not even Nancy Stair's; and as
she uttered these depreciations of her