Little Bel turned scarlet.  This was not her ideal of a wooer.  “Know what, Mr. Bruce?” she said resentfully.  “How should I know what ye came to say?”

“Tush! tush, lass! do na prevaricate,” Sandy began, his eyes gloating on her lovely confusion; “do na preteend—­” But the sweet blue eyes were too much for him.  Breaking down utterly, he tossed the guineas to one side on the table, and stretching out both hands toward Bel, he exclaimed,—­“Ye’re the sweetest thing the eyes o’ a mon ever rested on, lass, an’ I’m goin’ to win ye if ye’ll let me.”  And as Bel opened her mouth to speak, he laid one hand, quietly as a mother might, across her lips, and continued:  “Na! na!  I’ll not let ye speak yet.  I’m not a silly to look for ye to be ready to say me yes at this quick askin’; but I’ll not let ye say me nay neither.  Ye’ll not refuse me the only thing I’m askin’ the day, an’ that’s that ye’ll let me try to make ye love me.  Ye’ll not say nay to that, lass.  I’ll gie my life to it.”  And now he waited for an answer.

None came.  Tears were in Bel’s eyes as she looked up in his face.  Twice she opened her lips to speak, and twice her heart and the words failed her.  The tears became drops and rolled down the cheeks.  Sandy was dismayed.

“Ye’re not afraid o’ me, ye sweet thing, are ye?” he gasped out.  “I’d not vex ye for the world.  If ye bid me to go, I’d go.”

“No, I’m not afraid o’ ye, Mr. Bruce,” sobbed Bel.  “I don’t know what it is makes me so silly.  I’m not afraid o’ ye, though.  But I was for a few minutes yesterday,” she added archly, with a little glint of a roguish smile, which broke through the tears like an April sun through rain, and turned Sandy’s head in the twinkling of an eye.

“Ay, ay,” he said; “I minded it weel, an’ I said to myself then, in that first sight I had o’ yer face, that I’d not harm a hair o’ yer head.  Oh, my little lass, would ye gie me a kiss,—­just one, to show ye’re not afraid, and to gie me leave to try to win ye out o’ likin’ into lovin’?” he continued, drawing closer and bending toward her.

And then a wonderful thing happened.  Little Bel, who, although she was twenty years old, and had by no means been without her admirers, had never yet kissed any man but her father and brothers, put up her rosy lips, as confidingly as a little child, to be kissed by this strange wooer, who wooed only for leave to woo.

“An’ if he’d only known it, he might ha’ asked a’ he wanted then as well as later,” said Little Bel, honestly avowing the whole to her mother.  “As soon as he put his hands on me the very heart in me said he was my man for a’ my life.  An’ there’s no shame in it that I can see.  If a man may love that way in the lighting of an eye, why may not a girl do the same?  There’s not one kind o’ heart i’ the breast of a man an’ another kind i’ the breast of a woman, as ever I heard.”  In which Little Bel, in her innocence, was wiser than people wiser than she.