ted, and then she clapped her hands with a peal of laughter that
seemed to fill the entire atmosphere and ring back from the clumps of
wintry wood. "Oh," she cried, "it is you!" Jock did not know whether to
be deeply affronted or to laugh too.

"I----thought you might have lost your way," he said, knitting his brows
and looking as forbidding as he knew how, by way of correcting the
involuntary sentiment that had stolen into his boyish heart.

"Then why did not you come to me?" she said, "is not that what you call
to spy--to watch when one does not know you are there?"

Jock's countenance flushed at this word. "Spy! I never spied upon any
one. I thought perhaps you might not be able to get back--so I would not
go away out of reach."

"I see," she cried, "you meant to be kind but not friendly. Do I say it
right? Why will not you be friendly? I have so many things I want to
say, and no one, no one! to say them to. What harm would it do if you
came out from yourself, and talked with me a little? You are too young
to make it any--inconvenience," the girl said. She laughed a little and
blushed a little as she said this, eyeing him all the time with frank,
open eyes. "I am sixteen; how old are you?" she added, with a quick
breath.

"Sixteen past," said Jock, with a little emphasis, to show his
superiority in age as well as in other things.

"Sixteen in a boy means no more than nine or so," she said, with a light
disdain, "so you need not have any fear. Oh, come and talk! I have a
hundred and more of things to say. It is all so strange. How would you
like to plunge in a new world like the sea, and never say what you think
of it, or ask any questions, or tell when it makes you laugh or cry?"

"I should not mind much. I should neither laugh nor cry. It is only
girls that do," said Jock, somewhat contemptuous too.

"Well! But then I am a girl. I cannot change my nature to please you,"
she said. "Sometimes I think I should have liked better to be a boy, for
you have not to do the things we have to do--but then when I saw how
awkward you were, and how clumsy, and not good for anything"--she
pointed these very plain remarks with a laugh between each and a look at
Jock, by which she very plainly applied what she said. He did not know
at all how to take this. The instinct of a gentleman to betray no angry
feeling towards a girl, who was at the same time a lady, contrasted in
him with the instinct of a child, scarcely yet aware