ng a trial, to venture it now without some
effort of spirit; and time after time I had started on our stately round
of the hunting-road with a resolution wrought up all the way from my
looking-glass at Elrigmore, that this should be the night, if any, when
I should take the liberty that surely our rambles, though actual word of
love had not been spoken, gave me a title to. A title! I had kissed many
a bigger girl before in a caprice at a hedge-gate. But this little one,
so demurely walking by my side, with never so much as an arm on mine,
her pale face like marble in the moonlight, her eyes, when turned on
mine, like dancing points of fire---Oh! the task defied me! The task I
say--it was a duty, I'll swear now, in the experience of later years.

I kissed her first on the night before M'Iver set out on his travels
anew, no more in the camp of Argile his severed chief, but as a Cavalier
of the purchased sword.

It was a night of exceeding calm, with the moon, that I had seen as a
corn-hook over my warfare with MacLachlan in Tarra-dubh, swollen to the
full and gleaming upon the country till it shone as in the dawn of day.
We walked back and forth on the hunting-road, for long in a silence
broken by few words. My mind was in a storm. I felt that I was losing my
friend, and that, by itself, was trouble; but I felt, likewise, a shame
that the passion of love at my bosom robbed the deprivation of much of
its sorrow.

"I shall kiss her to-night if she spurns me for ever," I said to myself
over and over again, and anon I would marvel at my own daring; but the
act was still to do. It was more than to do--it was to be led up to, and
yet my lady kept every entrance to the project barred, with a cunning
that yet astounds me.

We had talked of many things in our evening rambles in that wood, but
never of M'Iver, whose name the girl shunned mention of for a cause
I knew but could never set her right on. This night, his last in our
midst, I ventured on his name. She said nothing for a little, and for
a moment I thought, "Here's a dour, little, unforgiving heart!"
Then, softly, said she, "I wish him well and a safe return from his
travelling. I wish him better than his deserts. That he goes at all
surprises me. I thought it but John Splendid's promise--to be acted on
or not as the mood happened."

"Yes," I said; "he goes without a doubt. I saw him to-day kiss his
farewells with half-a-dozen girls on the road between the Maltland an