ep it from the floor, standing looking at me, her
head about level with my own as it lay on the pillow.

"What is it?" I asked.

"_GetinwifJock_," she answered.

"What?" I inquired again, for she had slipped her words all together.

"Get--in--wif--Jock," she repeated, with an unmistakable movement of
her small hand to turn back the bed covers.

"You darling!" I cried, and drew her in beside me.

The tenderness I felt for her as she lay on my breast was akin to
agony. I trembled at the touch of her, and what she meant to me, and
all that I had missed. And long after she fell asleep, I lay, seeing
the past with new eyes, understanding new truths, and making myself,
please God, a better man.

I woke the next morning about eight, to find her gone, but as I was
dressing by the window I saw her below me in the garden, busy with some
hens that were clucking all about her.

"Hello, Little Flower," I called to her.[1]

[1] The name came to me with no thought, but for years it was the
one she fancied most, and many of her early poems were signed
L.F.S., or sometimes by nothing save a queer little drawing, half
rose and half daisy.

(The manuscript of the "Maid with the Wistfu' Eye" in the
Edinburgh collection has only this mark as signature.)

She smiled up at me, blinking in the strong sunshine, and I hastened
down to join her.

"Are you willing to come back with me to Stair?" I asked.

"We're getting ready, Jock," she answered, putting her hand in mine.

"We?" I inquired. "Whom do you mean?"

"Nancy Stair," she said, touching herself on the breast with her small
forefinger, "Dame Dickenson, Father Michel, Uncle Ben, the two or three
dogs, the kittens, the one without a name, the drey hen, and the broken
owl----"

"Nancy Stair," I broke in, with some firmness in my voice, "it will be
utterly impossible to take all these folk up to Stair Castle."

She looked at me and went white, as grown people do when news which
chills the blood is suddenly brought to them, and struck her little
hands together as though in pain. Turning suddenly she left me and
trotted off through a cleft in the stone wall of the kitchen garden, to
which place I followed her, with remorse in my heart for the rough way
in which I had spoken.

I found her lying flat in the grass, her face hidden in her arms, her
body trembling, but she made no sound.

"What is it, dear?" I asked.

"I can't go," she sai