o was unusually flushed and bright of eye.

By this time there wasn't much left to tell her about the Castle or the
Castle Rock. When I began to work off my erudition by mentioning the
name of Edwin, for whom Edinburgh was named, and who made it a royal
borough in the eleventh century, she said:

"Oh, Mr. Douglas's cousin, the other Douglas, told me that!"

When I related the tale of that gallant Francis who was able to lead Sir
Thomas Randolph and thirty soldiers up the perilous rocks to surprise
the Castle at night, having learned the way when sweethearting down in
the Grass-market, Barrie confessed that she had heard the story already.
Jack Morrison had found it in some old book he had bought at the shop
under John Knox's house, in the High Street. There was no use trying to
work up or classify historic thrills for her in this vast heart of
Scotland; she had been given them all, with generous additional thrills
from private hearts, Scottish and American.

"Has every single one of those chaps proposed to you?" I flung the
question in her face. "You might tell your Mentor."

"Oh, not Donald Douglas's cousin!" she answered hastily. "He's engaged
to some one in the Highlands."

"Good heavens, then all the rest _have_ done it, in a bunch!"

"I think you're _horrid_!" she said indignantly. "I've always heard that
girls don't tell such things to any one."

"They do to their brothers--of the pen, if they have any such. Besides,
you don't need to tell. I'm a regular Sherlock Holmes where people
I--like, are concerned, and I know what's been happening to you this
afternoon. A manna-rain of proposals, in the wilderness of Edinburgh
Castle. Many girls would have accepted them all, and then sorted them
out to see which they liked best; but I have a shrewd idea from the look
of the gentlemen's backs that they are now one and all your adopted
brethren."

"It's almost wicked to joke on such a subject," Barrie reproached me,
trying not to laugh, "and it's not nice of you to make fun of them, just
because you consider yourself superior, as an author who is always
analyzing people's minds and motives. It's not as if they were so much
in love with me that they had to propose in a hurry for their own sakes.
It's not that _at all_; but only because they thought it wouldn't be
very convenient for--Barbara to have me live with her, travelling about
so much, or if she should marry. So they felt as if something ought to
be _done_ fo