of the Strathsay heart were threads that never wore thin or parted.  Two twelvemonths more, and we should cross the sea ourselves at last; and wearying now of school a bit, all our visions centred in St. Anne’s, and the merry doings, the goings and comings, that we heard of there; and it seemed to me as if home were to be the beginning of life, as erst it had seemed that in school we should find the world.

It was the vacation of the long summer term; there was packing and padlocking to go each on her way, and the long dormitories rang with shrill clamor.  They all had a nest to seek.  Effie was already gone away with her chief crony, whose lady-mother, a distant kinswoman of our own, fancied the girl’s fair countenance.  I was to join them in a week or two,—­not yet, because I had wished to send home the screens painted on white velvet, and they wanted yet a sennight’s work, and I knew Mrs. Strathsay would be proud of them before the crackle of the autumn fires.  The maids ran hither and yon, and the bells pealed, and the knocker clashed, and the coaches rolled away over the stone pave of the court-yard, and there was embracing and jesting and crying, when suddenly all the pleasant hubbub stood still, for Miss Dunreddin was in the hall, and her page behind her, and she beckoned me from my post aloft on a foot-board, summoning the deserters before me and awarding them future expiations, amidst all manner of jeering and jinking and laughter.

A gentleman from the Provinces to see me in the little parlor:  he had brought us letters from home, and after Miss Dunreddin had broken the seals she judged we might have them, and I was at liberty for an hour, and meantime Angus Ingestre awaited me.  Angus!  I sprang down the stairs, my cheeks aglow, my heart on my lips, and only paused, finger on lock, wondering and hesitating and fearing, till the door was flung open, and I drawn in with two hands shut fast on my own, and two eyes—­great blue Ingestre eyes—­looking down on me from the face so far above:  for he towered like a Philistine.

“And is it Angus?” I cried.  For how was I to know the boy I had left in a midshipman’s jacket, in this mainmast of a man, undress-uniform and all?

“I’ve no need to ask, Is it Alice?” he answered.  “The same little peach of a chin!”

“Nay, but, Angus,—­’t will never do,—­and I all but grown up!”

“Not my little maid any longer, then?”

But so trembling and glad was I to see him, that I dared no more words, for I saw the tears glistening in my eyelashes and blinding me with their dazzling flashes.

So he took me to a seat, and sat beside me, and waited a minute; and after that waiting it was harder to speak than it had been before, and every thought went clean out of my head, and every word, and I stared at my hands till I seemed to see clear through them the pattern of my dress, and at the last I looked up, and there he had been bending forward and scanning me all the while; and then Angus laughed, and caught up my hand and pretended to search it narrowly.