ful perchance, as when he
liked it.

He checked himself in some word.

"Well, then," he said, "give it me, tell it me, look it me!"

I rose from my seat and shifted the piece of music before me,--turned
and gazed into his eyes one long breathing-space, then I let the lids
fall,--waited a minute so,--and turned back ere my lip should be all in
a quiver,--but not till his head bent once more, and a kiss had fallen
on those lids and lain there cool and soft as a pearl,--a pearl that
seemed to sink and penetrate and melt inwardly and dissolve and fill my
brain with a white blinding light of joy. 'Twas but a brief bit of the
great eternities;--and then I found my fingers playing I knew not how,
and heard the dancers' feet falling to the tune of I knew not what.

While I played there, Margray sat beside me, for the merriment was
without now, on the polished oak-floor of the hall, and they being few
but familiars who had the freedom of the house, (and among whom I had
had no need but to slip with a nod and smile ere gaining my seat,) she
took out her needle and set a stitch or two, more, perhaps, to cover
her being there at all than for any need of industry; for Margray loved
company, and her year of widowhood being not yet doubled, and my mother
unwilling that she should entertain or go out, she made the most of that
at our house; for Mrs. Strathsay had due regard of decency,--forbye she
deemed it but a bad lookout for her girls, if the one of them danced on
her good-man's grave.

"I doubt will Sir Angus bide here," said Margray at length; for though
all his boyhood she had called him by every diminutive his name could
bear, the title was a sweet morsel in her unaccustomed mouth, and she
kept rolling it now under her tongue. "Mrs. Strathsay besought him,
but his traps and his man were at the inn. Sir Angus is not the lad he
was,--a young man wants his freedom, my mother should remember."

And as her murmur continued, my thoughts came about me. They were like
birds in the hall; and all their voices and laughter rising above the
jingle of the keys, I doubted was he so sorry for me, after all. Then
the dancing broke, I found, though I still played on, and it was some
frolicsome game of forfeits, and Angus was chasing Effie, and with
her light step and her flying laugh it was like the wind following a
rose-flake. Anon he ceased, and stood silent and statelier than Mrs.
Strathsay's self, looking on.

"See Sir Angus now," s