eat flush sweeping over his face.
He came back by-and-by, and took me out into the garden. If he never had
been the real old Paul before--he was so now. He cut the pansies from my
best cap, and decorated Duncan's coat-of-arms--which had broken out
about the walls now-a-days--with them. But he might have cut the cap in
two for all I cared just then.

That night--I hoped he had not forgotten--I hoped he would come.
Presently I heard a quiet step which I knew to be his. Then I sat down
and listened again. Swish, swish--here she was at last. I had listened
too often to the soft rustle of her trailing gown to make any mistake
now. In my excitement--you see I was an old habitue at prying and
peering about the library by this time--I put one eye round the door, at
her very back. She had gone a few steps into the room--and now stood,
rooted to the spot, startled. There, with his face--and all that he
would have it say--fair and bright in the moonlight, stood Paul. He
opened his arms.

"Janet," he said.

With a little cry, and a sob, the girl rushed into them.

I went away back to my own room. I am sure it is superfluous to explain
my little plot: that it was not a photograph, but an old miniature of
Paul I had seen Janet with--an old miniature which I had painted on
ivory myself in the far-distant days. I am sure Paul never had a
photograph taken. Of course it was because I had recognised this that I
wanted Paul to wait in the library; but he was a better fencer than I,
and made me admit more than I intended. I sat down now, a world of old
memories whirling through my brain. I mixed this that I had just
seen--with something very like it in the long, long past--with the crash
of pots, and another figure that had thrown itself into Paul's arms.
There was the old room: _Janet_ had been said there, too; and the lips
through which the word had trembled were the same: and the voice was the
same also. Only the figure that had darted forward--was different.

I did not go to bed at all that night; but sat looking out over the
quiet, moon-lit garden and over the fields beyond, where the corn-crake
was calling, calling; the river slipping like a silver thread at the
far-away end of them; and patter, patter out and into the back-garden at
Glasgow went the little feet again; and to and fro ran the fair-haired
little lassie in the dirty pink cotton, tugging me this way and that by
the hand; and such a singing and swinging went on about