r me, you know, as soon as possible."

"Sainted, unselfish young men!" I murmured. "But I don't consider myself
superior, as it happens. I'd do the same thing in a minute if I thought
there were the faintest chance of your giving me an answer different
from theirs. Is there?"

"Don't talk nonsense!" she exclaimed. "But of course, I'm happy to say,
I know you don't mean it."

"Well, if you're happy to say that, I'll leave you your fond illusions
for the present," I returned. "But, as girl to man, tell me; don't you
rather like being proposed to?"

"It's very exciting," she admitted. "I never expected, somehow, that
such a thing could happen to me."

"Oh, didn't you? Why not?"

"Well, there's my red hair, which I always thought was _fatal_, until I
saw my mother's portrait--and heard Mr. Somerled say he liked painting
red-haired women."

"Red hair _can_ be fatal, though not in the way you appear to mean,"
said I. "Which thrilled you more, the Castle or the proposals?"

"Oh, the Castle, of course!" she answered scornfully. "After the first
one or two, they seemed like interruptions."

All five of my rivals (there might have been six, had it not been for
the girl in the Highlands) having had their medicine, I was allowed
almost as much as I wanted of Barrie's society during the walk down from
the Castle Rock, and to Holyrood. Together she and I walked through that
most romantic royal house of all the world; and long as I may live,
never shall I forget those hours. Chestnut-tressed Mary herself could
not have been lovelier than the red-haired girl who walked beside me,
and when the royal beauty came on a day of chill, northern haar, to her
Scottish realm, she was only a year older than this child we all love
but think too young for love. Yet already, at nineteen, Mary was a
King's widow, and had been Queen of France.

It was of Barrie's romance, Barrie's future, I thought most, as we
wandered side by side through the haunted rooms where Mary danced and
loved and suffered, where her grandson Charles I of England came, and
left his ruby Coronation ring for remembrance, and where Prince Charlie,
her far-off descendant, made hearts flutter at the great ball given in
his honour. But it was the past which had all Barrie's thoughts, unless
she sent a few to the man who had stayed at home reading his letters,
instead of following in her train.

We looked at Queen Mary's bed with its tattered splendour of brocade:
the b