tation to do so oftener; or was it the woman's
primal instinct, old as Eve in the Garden of Eden, just to tease the
man? I scarcely asked myself those questions. They ran through my
mind with the kind of physical impulse which you feel in the presence
of the possible woman. You are aware, then, of feelings and shadows of
feeling which cannot be expressed. There is something in you which
goes on speaking to the something in her, and you let it speak, glad,
wondering, expectant, never sure, never sorry. Odd, isn't it, this
language of sex which says most when it says nothing by speech, which
needs not speech, because it is spiritual, though springing, maybe,
from the call of the blood.

Marget had been reading, and when she invited me in, and I went, she
put the open book face downward on a little table, beside a half-made
sampler. She saw my eye wandering to the volume, a mere mechanical
curiosity on my part, and she picked it up with a laugh, saying, "There
is no need to hide those pages, unless it be that they are dull."

"What is the book all about?" I asked idly.

"It is a French romance," she said, "in which a lovely heroine treads
her way through an endless maze of difficult paths and a brigade of
villains to what, I have no doubt, when I get there with her, if ever I
do, will be endless wedded bliss. It is an over-sentimental story, for
the French young girl, but, then, one must try to keep up what French
one has, because it is a delightful language."

Marget had learned it as a girl in France, for she had lived there a
while, seen something of the Stuart Court over the water, of the Court
of King Louis also, and even heard the passing rustle of the skirts of
"the Pompadour" and Madame du Barry. Already the breath of a freer day
to come was blowing across that fair land, and her stay in it
definitely influenced Marget's character, ripened it quickly on broadly
beautiful lines, without hurting its pure scent of Scottish heather.

Hospitality was a duty as well as a pleasure in every Highland home,
and, after our trifles of a few minutes, she rose and went to give some
order. When she returned she said she had a small treat in store for
me, and it came into the room almost with herself. What do you think
it was? Why, tea!

It was a beverage then almost unknown in the Scottish Highlands, but
Marget's family, as she said, had at intervals received packets of it
from their friends in the south. Those