en's
shoon, brothers who want me not,--who would say behind their hands, 'He
has been twelve years a slave, and the world has changed since he went
away!' ... I will not trouble them."

His face was as sombre as when Truelove first beheld it. Suddenly, and
against her will, tears came to her eyes. "I am glad--I and my father and
mother and Ephraim--that thee goes not overseas, Angus MacLean," said the
dove's voice. "We would have thee--I and my father and mother and
Ephraim--we would have thee stay in Virginia."

"I am to stay," he answered. "I have felt no shame in taking a loan from
my friend, for I shall repay it. He hath lands up river in a new-made
county. I am to seat them for him, and there will be my home. I will build
a house and name it Duart; and if there are hills they shall be Dun-da-gu
and Grieg, and the sound of winter torrents shall be to me as the sound of
the waters of Mull."

Truelove caught her breath. "Thee will be lonely in those forests."

"I am used to loneliness."

"There be Indians on the frontier. They burn houses and carry away
prisoners. And there are wolves and dangerous beasts"--

"I am used to danger."

Truelove's voice trembled more and more. "And thee must dwell among
negroes and rude men, with none to comfort thy soul, none to whom thee can
speak in thy dark hours?"

"Before now I have spoken to the tobacco I have planted, the trees I have
felled, the swords and muskets I have sold."

"But at last thee came and spoke to me!"

"Ay," he answered. "There have been times when you saved my soul alive.
Now, in the forest, in my house of logs, when the day's work is done, and
I sit upon my doorstep and begin to hear the voices of the past crying to
me like the spirits in the valley of Glensyte, I will think of you
instead."

"Oh!" cried Truelove. "Speak to me instead, and I will speak to thee ...
sitting upon the doorstep of our house, when our day's work is done!"

Her hood falling back showed her face, clear pink, with dewy eyes. The
carnation deepening from brow to throat, and the tears trembling upon her
long lashes, she suddenly hid her countenance in her gray cloak. MacLean,
on his knees beside her, drew away the folds. "Truelove, Truelove! do you
know what you have said?"

Truelove put her hand upon her heart. "Oh, I fear," she whispered, "I fear
that I have asked thee, Angus MacLean, to let me be--to let me be--thy
wife."

The water shone, and the holly berries were