“Now, Alice, tell me, why are you so curt with Angus?  Did he start when he saw you first?”

“Nay, I scarcely think so, Margray; he knew about it, you know. ’Sleep, baby, sleep, in slumber deep, and smite across thy dreaming’”——­

“’Deed, he didn’t!  He told me so himself.  He said he’d been ever fancying you fresh and fair as the day he left you,—­and his heart cracked when you turned upon him.”

“Poor Angus, then,—­he never showed it. ‘Hush, baby, hush’”——­

“He said he’d have died first!”

“Then perhaps he never meant for you to tell me, Margray.”

“Oh, what odds?  He said,—­I’ll tell you what else he said,—­you’re a kind, patient heart, and there’s no need for you to fret,—­he said, as he’d done you such injury, were there even no other consideration, he should deem it his duty to repair it, so far as possible, both by the offer of his hand, and, should it be accepted, by tender faithfulness for life.”

“Oh, Margray! did Angus say that?  Oh, how chanced he to?  Oh, how dared he?”

“They’re not his very words, belike; but that’s the way I sensed them.  How came he?  Why,—­you see,—­I’m not content with my mother’s slow way of things,—­that’s just the truth!—­it’s like the season’s adding grain on grain of sunshine or of rain in ripening her fruit,—­it’s oftenest the quick blow strikes home; and so I just went picking out what I wanted to know for myself.”

“Oh, Margray,—­I suppose,—­what did he think?”

“Think?  He didn’t stop to think; he was mighty glad to meet somebody to speak to.  You may just thank your stars that you have such a lover, child!”

“I’ve got no lover!” I wailed, breaking out in crying above the babe.  “Oh, why was I born?  I’m like to die!  I wish I were under the sods this day!”

“Oh, goodness me!” exclaimed Margray, in a terror.  “What’s possessed the girl?  And I thinking to please her so!  Whisht now, Ailie girl,—­there, dear, be still,—­there, now, wipe away the tears; you’re weak and nervous, I believe,—­you’d best take a blue-pill to-night.  There’s the boy awake, and none but you can hush him off.  It’s odd, though, what a liking he’s taken to his Aunt Ailie!”

And so she kept on, diverting me, for Margray had some vague idea that my crying would bring my mother; and she’d not have her know of her talk with Angus, for the world;—­marriage after marriage would not lighten the rod of iron that Mrs. Strathsay held over her girls’ lives, I ween.

And now, having no need to be gay, I indulged my fancy and was sad; and the more Angus made as if he would draw near, the more I turned him off, as scale-armor turns a glancing blade.  Yet there had been times when, seeming as if he would let things go my own gate, he had come and sat beside me in the house, or joined his horse’s bridle to mine in the woods, and syllables slipped into sentences, and the