e was kinder to me. She
appeared not to think of me either one way or the other. She curtsied to
me, like a bird, flirting the train of her gown like a wagtail on a
stone by the running stream. One forenoon she met us, strolling with
little Louis by the hand, her black hair crowned with scarlet
hips--those berries of the wild dog-rose which grow so great in our
country lanes. She waved us a joyous little salute from the top of a
stile, on which she perched as lightly as if joyful graces were
fluttering about her, and she herself ready to take wing.

But she never so much as looked wistful, but let me go my way with a
single flirt of a kerchief she was adjusting about her brother's neck.
As for me I was ready to hang myself in self-contempt and hatred of poor
innocent Charlotte Anderson, who smiled and imagined, doubtless, that
she was fulfilling the end for which she had come to Miss Huntingdon's.

After we had separated I went to thinking sadly on the stupidity of my
performances. This field of thought was a large one and the
consideration of it, patch by patch, took some time. It was market day.
The bleating of flocks was about me, a pleasant smell of wool and tar
and heather--and of bullocks blowing clouds of perfumed breath that
condensed upon the frosty air. I was leaning my arms upon the stone dyke
of the Market Hill and thinking of Irma, now by my own act rendered more
inaccessible than ever--when a hand, heavy as a ham falling from a high
ceiling, descended upon my shoulder. A voice of incomparable richness, a
little husky perhaps with the morning's moistening at the King's Arms,
cried out, "So ho, lad! thou dost not want assurance! Thinking on the
lasses at thy age! You're the chap, they tell me, that's been walkin'
out my daughter in broad daylight! Well, well, cannot find it in my
heart to be too hard--did the like mysel' thirty years ago, and never
regretted it. School-master's son, aren't ye? Thought I kenned ye by
sight! Student lad at the College of Edinburgh? Yes, yes--knew thy
father any time ever since he came from the North. No man has anything
to say again thy father! Except that he does not lay on the young
rascals' backs half heavily enough! I dare say thou would be noways the
worse of a dressing down thysel'!"

All this time he was thumping me on my back, and I was standing before
him with such a red face, and (I doubt not) such a compound of idiocy
and black despair upon it, that I might have b