quite
ready to marry his daughter. It is a thing not much practised among
gentlefolk, but, what with being so much with your mantua-makers, you
will doubtless not know any better!"

"Irma--Irma," I cried, not caring any more for Eben, now in the nearer
distance, "it is all a mistake--indeed, a mistake from the beginning!"

"Very possibly," she returned, with an airy haughtiness; "at any rate,
it is no mistake of mine!"

And there, indeed, she had me. I had perforce to shift my ground.

"I am not going to marry Charlotte Anderson," I said.

"Then the more shame of you to deceive her after all!" she cried. "It
seems that you make a habit of it! Surely I am the last person to whom
you ought to boast of that!"

"On the contrary, you are the first!"

But she passed on her way, her head high, an invincible lightness in the
spring of every footstep, a splash of scarlet berries making a star
among her dark hair, and humming the graceless lilt which told how--

"Willie's ga'en to Melville Castle,
Boots an' spurs an' a'--!"

As for me, I was ready to sink deep into the ground with despondency,
wishful to rise never more. But I stopped, and though Uncle Eben was
almost opposite to me, and within thirty yards, I called after her, "The
day will come, Irma Maitland, when you will be sorry for the injustice
you are doing!"

For I thought of how she would feel when Charlotte told about her cousin
Tam Gallaberry and all that I had done for them--though, indeed, it was
mostly by accident. Only I could trust Charlotte to keep her thumb upon
that part of it.

I did not know what she felt then, nor, perhaps, do I quite know yet;
but she caught a tangle of wild cut-leafed ivy from a tree on which I
had long watched it grow, and with a spray of small green leaves she
crowned herself, and so departed as she had come, singing as if she had
not a care in the world, or as if I, Duncan MacAlpine, were the last and
least of all.

And yet I judged that there might be a message for me in that very act.
She had escaped me, and yet there was something warm in her heart in
spite of all. Perhaps, who knows, an angel had gone down and troubled
the waters; nor did I think, somehow, that any other would step in there
before me.

After that I went down to see Fred Esquillant, who listened with sad yet
brilliant eyes to my tangled tale.

"You are the lucky one," I said, "to have nothing to do with the lasses.
See what trouble they l