she did not share with me.  But then, to be sure, we had been neighbours all our lives, for her father, Andrew Dunlop, kept a grocer’s shop not fifty yards from our house, and she and I had been playmates ever since our school-days, and had fallen to sober and serious love as soon as we arrived at what we at any rate called years of discretion—­which means that I was nineteen, and she seventeen, when we first spoke definitely about getting married.  And two years had gone by since then, and one reason why I had no objection to earning Mr. Gilverthwaite’s ten pounds was that Maisie and I meant to wed as soon as my salary was lifted to three pounds a week, as it soon was to be, and we were saving money for our furnishing—­and ten pounds, of course, would be a nice help.

So presently I went along the street to Dunlop’s and called Maisie out, and we went down to the walls by the river mouth, which was a regular evening performance of ours.  And in a quiet corner, where there was a seat on which we often sat whispering together of our future, I told her that I had to do a piece of business for our lodger that night and that the precise nature of it was a secret which I must not let out even to her.

“But here’s this much in it, Maisie,” I went on, taking care that there was no one near us that could catch a word of what I was saying; “I can tell you where the spot is that I’m to do the business at, for a fine lonely spot it is to be in at the time of night I’m to be there—­an hour before midnight, and the place is that old ruin that’s close by where Till meets Tweed—­you know it well enough yourself.”

I felt her shiver a bit at that, and I knew what it was that was in her mind, for Maisie was a girl of imagination, and the mention of a lonely place like that, to be visited at such an hour, set it working.

“Yon’s a queer man, that lodger of your mother’s, Hughie,” she said.  “And it’s a strange time and place you’re talking of.  I hope nothing’ll come to you in the way of mischance.”

“Oh, it’s nothing, nothing at all!” I hastened to say.  “If you knew it all, you’d see it’s a very ordinary business that this man can’t do himself, being kept to his bed.  But all the same, there’s naught like taking precautions beforehand, and so I’ll tell you what we’ll do.  I should be back in town soon after twelve, and I’ll give a tap at your window as I pass it, and then you’ll know all’s right.”

That would be an easy enough thing to manage, for Maisie’s room, where she slept with a younger sister, was on the ground floor of her father’s house in a wing that butted on to the street, and I could knock at the pane as I passed by.  Yet still she seemed uneasy, and I hastened to say what—­not even then knowing her quite as well as I did later—­I thought would comfort her in any fears she had.  “It’s a very easy job, Maisie,” I said; “and the ten pounds’ll go a long way in buying that furniture we’re always talking about.”