scend to
the new housemaid.

Annie sat still, staring at her book, and turning red and pale
alternately. But he took no notice of her, and she tried to be glad of
it.

When school was over, however, he came up to her in the lane, and
addressed her kindly.

But the delicate little maiden felt, as the rough stonemason had felt,
that a change had passed over the old companion and friend. True, the
change was only a breath--a mere shadow. Yet it was a measureless gulf
between them. Annie went to her garret that night with a sense of sad
privation.

But her pain sprung from a source hardly so deep as that of the
stonemason. For the change she found in Alec was chiefly of an external
kind, and if she had a vague feeling of a deeper change, it had
scarcely yet come up into her consciousness. When she saw the _young
gentleman_ her heart sank within her. Her friend was lost; and a shape
was going about, as he did, looking awfully like the old Alec, who had
carried her in his arms through the invading torrent. Nor was there
wanting, to complete the bewilderment of her feeling, a certain
additional reverence for the apparition, which she must after all
regard as a further development of the same person.

Mrs Forbes never asked her to the house now, and it was well for her
that her friendship with Tibbie Dyster had begun. But as she saw Alec
day after day at school, the old colours began to revive out of the
faded picture--for to her it was a faded picture, although new
varnished. And when the spring had advanced a little, the boat was got
out, and then Alec could not go rowing in the _Bonnie Annie_ without
thinking of its godmother, and inviting her to join them. Indeed Curly
would not have let him forget her if he had been so inclined; for he
felt that she was a bond between him and Alec, and he loved Alec the
more devotedly that the rift between their social positions had begun
to show itself. The devotion of the schoolboy to his superior in
schoolboy arts had begun to change into something like the devotion of
the clansman to his chief--not the worst folly the world has known--in
fact not a folly at all, except it stop there: many enthusiasms are
follies only because they are not greater enthusiasms. And not
unfrequently would an odd laugh of consciousness between Annie and
Curly, unexpectedly meeting, reveal the fact that they were both
watching for a peep or a word of Alec.

In due time the harvest came; and Annie co