ffered himself--a man
with a great position--and I accepted him and it was worse than ever, so
I fled from it all--to Priorsford. I loved it from the first, the little
town and the river and the hills, and Bella Bathgate's grim honesty and
poor cookery! And you came into my life again and I found I couldn't
marry the other man and his position...."

"Pamela, can you really marry a fool like me? ... It's my fault that
we've missed so much, but thank God we haven't missed everything. I
think I could make you happy. I wouldn't ask you to stay at Laverlaw for
more than a month or two at a time. We would live in London if you
wanted to. I could stick even London if I had you."

Pamela looked at him with laughter in her eyes.

"And you couldn't say fairer than that, my dear. No, no, Lewis. If I
marry you we'll live at Laverlaw I love your green glen already; it's a
place after my own heart. We won't trouble London much, but spend our
declining years among the sheep--unless you become suddenly ambitious
for public honours and, as Mrs. Hope desires, enter Parliament."

"There's no saying what I may do now. Already I feel twice the man I
was."

They talked in the firelight and Pamela said: "I'm not sure that our
happiness won't be the greater because it has come twenty years late.
Twenty years ago we would have taken it pretty much as a matter of
course. We would have rushed at our happiness and swallowed it whole, so
to speak. Now, with twenty lonely, restless years behind us we shall go
slowly, and taste every moment and be grateful. Years bring their
compensation.... It's a funny world. It's a _nice,_ funny world."

"I think," said Lewis, "I know something of what Jacob must have felt
after he had served all the years and at last took Rachel by the hand--"

"'Served' is good," said Pamela in mocking tones.

But her eyes were tender.

CHAPTER XXIII

"It was high spring, and, all the way
Primrosed and hung with shade...."

HENRY VAUGHAN.

"There is no private house in which people can enjoy themselves so
well as at a capital tavern.... No, Sir, there is nothing which has
yet been contrived by man by which so much happiness is produced as
by a good tavern or inn."--DR. JOHNSON.

Pamela and David between them carried the day, and a motor-car was
bought. It was not the small useful car talked about at first, but one
which had greatly taken the fancy of the Jardine family in the