aggard face. His look was radiant and proud. He spoke with
a firm voice; and yet there was a great tenderness in his tone.

"I am sure you love me," she said, in a low voice.

"You will see," he rejoined, with a firm confidence.

"And I am not going to requite your love ill. You are too vehement. You
think of nothing but the one end to it all. But I am a woman, and women
are taught to be patient. Now you must let me think about all you have
said."

"And you do not quite refuse?" said he.

She hesitated for a moment or two.

"I must think for you as well as for myself," she said, in a scarcely
audible voice. "Give me time. Give me till the end of the week."

"At this hour I will come."

"And you will believe I have decided for the best--that I have tried
hard to be fair to you as well as myself?"

"I know you are too true a woman for anything else," he said; and then
he added, "Ah, well, now, you have had enough misery for one morning;
you must dry your eyes now, and we will go out into the garden; and if I
am not to say anything of all my gratitude to you--why? Because I hope
there will be many a year to do that in, my angel of goodness!"

She went to fetch a light shawl and a hat; he kept turning over the
things on the table, his fingers trembling, his eyes seeing nothing. If
they did see anything, it was a vision of the brown moors near Castle
Dare, and a beautiful creature, clad all in cream-color and scarlet,
drawing near the great gray stone house.

She came into the room again; joy leaped to his eyes.

"Will you follow me?"

There was a strangely subdued air about her manner as she led him to
where her father was; perhaps she was rather tired after the varied
emotions she had experienced; perhaps she was still anxious. He was not
anxious. It was in a glad way that he addressed the old gentleman who
stood there with a spade in his hand.

"It is indeed a beautiful garden," Macleod said, looking round on the
withered leaves and damp soil; "no wonder you look after it yourself."

"I am not gardening," the old man said, peevishly. "I have been putting
a knife in the ground--burying the hatchet, you might call it. Fancy! A
man sees an old hunting-knife in a shop at Gloucester--a hunting-knife
of the time of Charles I., with a beautifully carved ivory handle; and
he thinks he will make a present of it to me. What does he do but go and
have it ground, and sharpened, and polished until if looks like
somet