All my moors and heather passed like a glamour.  The green-wood shaws would be there another year,—­Angus was here to-day.  I cast about me, and knew that Miss Dunreddin would speed away to take her pleasure, and there’d be none left but the governess and the painting-mistress, with a boarder or two like myself,—­and as for the twain, I could wind them round my thumb.

“Oh, Angus,” I said, breathlessly, “there’s Arthur’s Seat, and the palaces, and the galleries and gardens,—­it’ll be quite as good as the moors; there’ll be no Miss Dunreddin, and you can stay here all the leelang simmer’s day!”

He smiled, as he answered,—­

“And I suppose those scarlet signals at the fore signify”——­

“Nothing!”

“Fast colors, I see.”

“It’s my father’s own color, and I’m proud of it,—­barring the telltale trouble.”

“You’re proud,” said he, absently, standing up to go, “that you are the only one of them all that heirs him?”

“Not quite.  It’s the olive in my father’s cheek that darkened his wife’s yellow curls into Mary Strathsay’s chestnut ones.  And she’s like me in more than that, gin she doesn’t sell hersel’ for siller and gowd.”

“I’ll tell you what.  Mrs. Strathsay is over-particular in speech.  She’ll have none of the broad Highland tongue about her.  It’s a daily struggle that she has, not to strike Nurse Nannie dumb, since she has infected you all with her dialect.  A word in time.  Now I must go.  To-morrow night I’ll come and take you to the play, Miss Dunreddin or no Miss Dunreddin.  But sing to me first.  It’s a weary while since I used to hear that voice crooning itself to sleep across the hall with little songs.”

So I sang the song he chose, “My love, she’s but a lassie yet”; and he took the bunch of bluebells from my braids, and was gone.

The next night Angus was as good as his word.  Miss Dunreddin was already off on her pleasuring, he took the gray little governess for duenna, and a blither three never sat out a tragedy, or laughed over wine and oysters in the midst of a garden with its flowers and fountains afterwards.  ’T was a long day since the poor little woman had known such merrymaking; and as for me, this playhouse, this mimicry of life, was a new sphere.  We went again and again,—­sometimes the painting-mistress, too; then she and the governess fell behind, and Angus and I walked at our will.  Other times we wandered through the gay streets, or we went up on the hill and sat out the sunsets, and we strolled through the two towns, high and low.  The days sped, the long shine of the summer days, and, oh, my soul was growing in them like a weed in the sun!