r of the
room. For many considerations were in his simple words. That he should
say them at all relieved the tension of my wonder; that he should
say them in the way he did, was, in a manner, a manifestation that he
guessed the real state of ray feelings to the lady whose very name I had
not dared to mention to him, and that he was ready to favour any suit
I pressed I was even inclined to push my reading of his remark further,
and say to myself that if he had not known the lady herself favoured me,
he would never have fanned my hope by even so little as an indifferent
sentence.

"And how is she--how is Betty?" I asked, lamely.

He laughed with a pleasing slyness, and gave me a dunt with his elbow on
the side, a bit of the faun, a bit of the father, a bit of my father's
friend.

"You're too blate, Colin," he said, and then he put his arm through his
wife's and gave her a squeeze to take her into his joke. I would have
laughed at the humour of it but for the surprise in the good woman's
face. It fair startled me, and yet it was no more than the look of a
woman who leams that her man and she have been close company with a
secret for months, and she had never made its acquaintance. There was
perhaps a little more, a hesitancy in the utterance, a flush, a tone
that seemed to show the subject was one to be passed bye as fast as
possible.

She smiled feebly a little, picked up a row of dropped stitches, and
"Oh, Betty," said she, "Betty--is--is--she'll be back in a little. Will
you not wait?"

"No, I must be going," I said; "I may have the happiness of meeting her
before I go up the glen in the afternoon."

They pressed me both to stay, but I seemed, in my mind, to have a new
demand upon me for an immediate and private meeting with the girl; she
must be seen alone, and not in presence of the old couple, who would
give my natural shyness in her company far more gawkiness than it might
have if I met her alone.

I went out and went down the stair, and along the front of the land, my
being in a tumult, yet with my observation keen to everything, no matter
how trivial, that happened around me. The sea-gulls, that make the town
the playground of their stormy holidays, swept and curved among the
pigeons in the gutter and quarrelled over the spoils; tossed in the air
wind-blown, then dropped with feet outstretched upon the black joists
and window-sills. Fowls of the midden, new brought from other parts to
make up the place o