“Ay, lass,” said he then, laughing gleefully as any boy, and catching both of my hands again that I had drawn away.  “I’ve a puzzle of my own to show thee,—­a charade of two syllables,—­a tiny thing, and yet it holds my world!  See, the first!”

He had led me to the mirror and stationed me there alone.  I liked not to look, but I did.

“Why, Angus,” I said, “it’s I.”

“Well done! and go to the head.  It’s you indeed.  But what else, Ailie darling?  Nay, I’ll tell you, then.  The first syllable—­just to suit my fancy—­shall be bride, shall it not?”

“Bride,” I murmured.

“And there behold the last syllable!” taking a step aside to the window, and throwing wide the blind.

I looked down the dark, but there was nought except the servant in the light of the hanging lamp, holding the curbs of the two horses that leaped and reared with nervous limbs and fiery eyes behind him.

“Is it horses?—­steeds?—­oh, bridles!”

“But thou’rt a very dunce!  The last syllable is groom.”

“Oh!”

“Now you shall see the embodiment of the whole word”; and with the step he was before the glass again.  “Look!” he said; “look from under my arm,—­you are just as high as my heart!”

“Why, that’s you, Angus,”—­and a gleam was dawning on me.

“Of course it is, little stupid!  No less.  And it’s bridegroom too, and never bridegroom but with this bride!” And he had turned upon me and was taking me into his arms.

“Oh, Angus!” I cried,—­“can you love me with no place on my face to kiss?”

But he found a place.

“Can I help loving you?” he said,—­“Oh, Ailie, I do!  I do—­when all my years you have been my dream, my hope, my delight, when my life is yours, when you are my very self!”

And I clung to him for answer, hiding all my troubled joy in his breast.

Then, while he still held me so, silent and tender, close-folding,—­there rose a great murmur through the rooms, and all the people surged up to one end, and Margray burst in upon us, calling him.  He drew me forth among them all, his arm around my waist, and they opened a lane for us to the window giving into the garden, and every eye was bent there on a ghastly forehead, a grim white face, a terrible face, pressed against the glass, and glaring in with awful eyes!

“By Heaven, it is Helmar!” cried Angus, fire leaping up his brow;—­but Mary Strathsay touched him to stone with a fling of her white finger, and went like a ghost herself and opened the casement, as the other signed for her to do.  He never gave her glance or word, but stepped past her straight to my mother, and laid the white, shining, dripping bundle that he bore—­the trilling hushed, the sparkle quenched, so flaccid, so limp, so awfully still—­at her feet.

“I never loved the girl,” he said, hoarsely.  “Yet to-night she would have fled with me.  It was my revenge, Mrs. Strathsay!  She found her own death from a careless foot, the eager haste of an arm, the breaking branch of your willow-tree.  Woman! woman!” he cried, shaking his long white hand before her face, “you took the light out of my life, and I swore to darken your days!”