r
evermore. He knew not, this poor foolish Sholto, that he had much to
learn ere he should know all the tricks and stratagems of this most
naughty and prettily disdainful minx, Mistress Maud Lindesay.

But for that night at least he thought he knew her heart and soul,
which made him just as happy.

CHAPTER XVIII

THE MORNING LIGHT

In the morning Sholto MacKim had other views of it. Even when at last
he was relieved from duty he never closed an eye. The blowing out of
the lamp had turned his ideas and hopes all topsy-turvy. His heart
sang loud and turbulent within him. He had kissed other girls indeed
before at kirns and country dances. He laughed triumphantly within him
at the difference. They had run into corners and screamed and
struggled, and held up ineffectual hands. And when his lips did reach
their goal, it was generally upon the bridge of a nose or a tip of an
ear. He could not remember any especial pleasure accompanying the
rite.

But this! The bolt of an arbalast could not have given him a more
instant or tremendous shock. His nerves still quivered responsive to
the tremulous yielding of the lips he had touched for a moment in the
dark of the doorway. He felt that never could he be the same man he
had been before. Deep in his heart he laughed at the thought.

And then again, with a quick revulsion, the return wave came upon him.
"How, if she be as untouched as her beauty is fresh, has she learned
that skill in caressing?"

He paused to think the matter over.

"I remember my father saying that a wise man should always mistrust a
girl who kisses overwell."

Then again his better self would reassert itself.

"No," he would argue, tramping up and down the corridor, wheeling in
the short bounds of the turnpike head, and again returning upon his
own footsteps, "why should I belie her? She is as pure as the
air--only, of course, she is different to all others. She speaks
differently; her eyes are different, her hair, her hands--why should
she not be different also in this?"

But when Maud Lindesay met Sholto in the morning, coming suddenly upon
him as he stood, with a pale face and dark rings of sleeplessness
about his eyes, as he looked meditatively out upon the broad river and
the blue smoke of the morning campfires, there was yet another
difference to be revealed to him. He had expected that, like others,
she would be confused and bashful meeting him thus in the daylight,
after--well, afte