me--unless my hand on Sundays
when their faces are more than ordinarily clean. Would you like to have
that, Heather Jock?"

And she held out the back of her hand.

The silly fellow coloured to his brow, and was for turning away with his
head very much in the air.

But she ran after him, and took him by the hand.

Then he would have caught her about with his arms, but she escaped out
of them lightly as a bird.

"Na, na, Lochinvar," she cried merrily, in the common speech. "That is
as muckle as is good for you"--she looked at him with the light of
attraction in her eyes--"afore folk," she added, with a glance at him
that I could not fathom.

Nevertheless, I saw for the first time all that was between them. So
with no more said, Kate fled fleet-foot down the path towards the great
house, which we could see standing grey and massive at the end of the
avenue of beeches.

"There's a lass by yon burnside that will do as muckle for you; but
dinna bide to speer her leave!" she cried to me over her shoulder, a
word which it was hard to understand.

I asked Wat, who stood staring after her in a kind of wrapt adoration,
what she could mean.

He gazed at me, as if he did not see what kind of animal was making the
noise like talking. I am sure that for the time he knew me not from John
Knox.

"What did she mean?" I asked him.

"Mean!" said he, "mean----" speaking vaguely as one in a swither.

"You are heady and moidered with not getting a kiss from a lass," said
I, with, I grant, some little spite.

"Did she ever kiss you?" cried he, looking truculently at me.

"Nay!" said I bluntly, for indeed the thing was not in my thought.

"Then you ken naught about it. You had better hold your wheesht!"

He stood so long thinking, sometimes giving his thigh a little slap,
like one that has suddenly remembered something pleasant which he had
forgotten, that I was near coming away in disgust and leaving the fool,
when I remembered that I knew not where to go.

In a while he came to himself somewhat, and I told him what Kate McGhie
had said to me over her shoulder.

"Did Kate say that?" he cried. "She could surely not have said all that
and I not hear her."

"Out, you fool," I said, for so of custom I spoke to him, being my
cousin and playmate. "You had other matter to think of. Say it she did."

He repeated the words which I told him, and I declare even the sound of
them seemed to be in danger of throwing him into anoth