“Let us stay here, my beloved,” he whispered.  “I have something sweet to tell you.  Upon mine honour, I can keep my secret no longer.”

The innocent child!  Who could blame her for listening to it?—­at first with a little fear and a little reluctance, but gradually resigning her whole heart to the charm of his soft syllables and his fervent manner, until she gave him the promise he begged for,—­love that was to be for him alone, love for him alone among all the sons of men.

What an enchanted afternoon it was! how all too quickly it fled away, one golden moment after another! and what a pang it gave her to find at the end that there must be lying and deception!  For, somehow, she had been persuaded to acquiesce in her lover’s desire for secrecy.  As for the lie, he told it with the utmost air of candour.

“Yes, we had a beautiful sail; and how enchanting the banks above here are!  Aunt, I am at your service to-morrow, if you wish to see them.”

“Oh, your servant, Captain, but I am an indifferent sailor; and I trust I have too much respect for myself and my new frocks, to crowd them into a river cockboat!”

In a few minutes Joanna and the elder came in.  He had called for her on his way home; for he liked the society of the young and beautiful, and there were many hours in which he thought Joanna fairer than her sister.  Then tea was served in a pretty parlour with Turkish walls and coloured windows, which, being open into the garden, framed lovely living pictures of blossoming trees.  Every one was eating and drinking, laughing and talking; so Katherine’s unusual silence was unnoticed, except by the elder, who indeed saw and heard everything, and who knew what he did not see and hear by that kind of prescience to which wise and observant years attain.  He saw that the cakes Katherine dearly loved remained upon her plate untasted, and that she was unusually, suspiciously quiet.

After tea he walked down the garden with Colonel Gordon.  The lily bed was near the river; and he made the gathering of some lilies for Katherine an excuse for going close enough to the pier to see how the boat lay, and whether the oars had been moved from the exact position in which he had placed them.  And he found the boat rocking at its moorings, tied with his own peculiar knot.  It told him everything, and he was sincerely troubled at the discovery.

[Illustration:  In one of those tall-backed Dutch chairs]

“Love and lying,” he mused.  “I wonder why they are ever such thick friends.  As for Dick Hyde, lying is his native tongue; but if Katharine Van Heemskirk has been aye one thing above another, it was to tell the truth.  It ought to come easy to her likewise, for I’ll say the same o’ the hale nation o’ Dutchmen.  I dinna think Joris would tell a lie to save baith life and fortune.”