the dim complexion flushed:  if ever a face expressed supreme delight, Alick’s did then; and it expressed what he felt, for, as we know, the one love of his boyish life was this girl-queen of his fancy.  Not that he was in love with her in the ordinary sense of being in love.  He was too reverent and she too young for vulgar passion or commonplace sentiment.  She was something precious to his imagination, not his senses, like a child-queen to her courtier, a high-born lady to her page.  He bore with her girlish temper, her girlish insolence of pride, her ignorant opposition, with the humility of strength bending its neck to weakness—­the devotion and unselfish sweetness characteristic of him in other of his relations than those with Leam.  Judge, then, if he was likely to be bored, as his mother feared, or if this project of a closer domestication with her was not rather a “bit of blue” in his sky which made these early autumn days gladder than the gladdest summer-time.

To will and to do were synonymous with Mrs. Corfield:  her motto was velle est agere; and a resolve once taken was like iron at white heat, struck into the shape of deed on the instant.  Darting up from her chair, birdlike and angular, she put away her work.  “Order the trap,” she said briskly, “and come with me.  We will go at once, before that poor creature has had time to do anything, wild, or silly.”

“I do not think she would do anything wild or silly, mother,” said Alick in a deprecating voice.  It galled him to hear his darling spoken of so slightingly.

“No?  What has she ever done that was rational?” cried his mother sharply.  “From the beginning, when she was a baby of three months old, and howled at me because I kissed her, and that dreadful mother of hers flew at me like a wildcat and said I had the evil eye, Leam Dundas has been more like some changeling than an ordinary English girl.  I declare it sometimes makes my heart ache to, see her with those awful eyes of hers, looking as if she had seen one does not know what—­as if she was being literally burnt up alive with sorrow.  However, don’t let us discuss her:  let us fetch her and save her from herself.  That is more to the purpose at this moment.”

And Alick said “Yes,” and went out to order the trap with alacrity.

When they reached Andalusia Cottage, the first thing they saw was a strange workman from Sherrington painting out the name which in his early love-days for his Spanish bride Sebastian Dundas had put up in bold letters across the gate-posts.  The original name of the place had been Ford House, but the old had had to give place to the new in those days as in these, and Ford House had been rechristened Andalusia Cottage as a testimony and an homage.  Mrs. Corfield questioned the man in her keen inquisitorial way as to what he was about; and when he told her that the posts were to show “Virginia” now instead of “Andalusia,” her great disgust, to judge by the sharp things which