ge post-office without so much as a backward glance. She was
a changed being, then! I might as well be living in a Gaboriau novel,
I thought, and went up into my little painting and writing room to
address a programme of the Pettybaw celebration to Lady Baird, watch
for the first glimpse of Willie coming down the loaning, and see if I
could discover where Francesca went from the post-office.

Sitting down by my desk, I could find neither my wax nor my silver
candlestick, my scissors nor my ball of twine. Plainly, Francesca had
been on one of her borrowing tours; and she had left an additional
trace of herself--if one were needed--in a book of old Scottish
ballads, open at Hynde Horn. I glanced at it idly while I was waiting
for her to return. I was not familiar with the opening verses, and
these were the first lines that met my eye:--

"Oh, he gave to his love a silver wand,
Her sceptre of rule over fair Scotland;
With three singing laverocks set thereon
For to mind her of him when he was gone.

"And his love gave to him a gay gold ring
With three shining diamonds set therein;
Oh, his love gave to him this gay gold ring,
Of virtue and value above all thing."

A light dawned upon me! The silver mystery, then, was intended for a
wand,--and a very pretty way of making love to an American girl, too,
to call it a "sceptre of rule over fair Scotland;" and the three birds
were three singing laverocks "to mind her of him when he was gone!"

But the real Hynde Horn in the dear old ballad had a true love who was
not captious and capricious and cold like Francesca. His love gave him
a gay gold ring,--

"Of virtue and value above all thing."

Yet stay: behind the ballad book flung heedlessly on my desk was--what
should it be but the little morocco case, empty now, in which our
Francesca keeps her dead mother's engagement ring,--the mother who
died when she was a wee child. Truly a very pretty modern ballad to be
sung in these unromantic, degenerate days!

Francesca came in at the door behind me, saw her secret reflected in
my telltale face, saw the sympathetic moisture in my eyes, and,
flinging herself into my willing arms, burst into tears.

"Oh, Pen, dear, dear Pen, I am so miserable and so happy; so afraid
that he won't come back, so frightened for fear that he will! I sent
him away because there were so many lions in the path, and I didn't
know how to slay them. I thought of my f-