Mr. White and his daughter
were to be in the Highlands next summer; they would be in the
neighborhood of Castle Dare; Lady Macleod would be glad to entertain
them for a time, and make the acquaintance of two of her son's friends.
At all events, the proud old lady would be able to see what sort of
woman this was whom Keith Macleod had chosen to be his wife.

And so the winter days and nights and weeks dragged slowly by; but
always, from time to time, came those merry and tender and playful
letters from the South, which he listened to rather than read. It was
her very voice that was speaking to him, and in imagination he went
about with her. He strolled with her over the crisp grass, whitened with
hoar-frost, of the Regent's Park; he hurried home with her in the chill
gray afternoons--the yellow gas-lamps being lit--to the little
tea-table. When she visited a picture gallery, she sent him a full
report of that, even.

"Why is it," she asked, "that one is so delighted to look a long
distance, even when the view is quite uninteresting? I wonder if that is
why I greatly prefer landscapes to figure subjects. The latter always
seem to me to be painted from models just come from the Hampstead Road.
There was scarcely a sea-piece in the exhibition that was not spoiled
by figures, put in for the sake of picturesqueness, I suppose. Why, when
you are by the sea you want to be alone, surely! Ah, if I could only
have a look at those winter seas you speak of!"

He did not echo that wish at all. Even as he read he could hear the
thunderous booming of the breakers into the giant caves. Was it for a
pale rose-leaf to brave that fell wind that tore the waves into
spindrift, and howled through the lonely chasms of Ben-an-Sloich?

To one of these precious documents, written in the small, neat hand on
pink-toned and perfumed paper, a postscript was added: "If you keep my
letters," she wrote, and he laughed when he saw that _if_, "I wish you
would go back to the one in which I told you of papa and me calling at
Mr. Lemuel's house, and I wish, dear Keith, you would burn it. I am sure
it was very cruel and unjust. One often makes the mistake of thinking
people affected when there is no affectation about them. And if a man
has injured his health and made an invalid of himself, through his
intense and constant devotion to his work, surely that is not anything
to be laughed at? Whatever Mr. Lemuel may be, he is, at all events,
desperately in e