Then she gathered up the books very gently, and taking a kerchief from her neck, she folded the two great books within it, fastening them with a cunning knot.  She was carrying them slowly up towards the farm town of Craig Ronald in her bare arms when Ralph Peden sat answering his catechism in the study at the manse.  She entered the dreaming courtyard, and walked sedately across its silent sun-flooded spaces without a sound.  She passed the door of the cool parlour where her grandfather and grandmother sat, the latter with her hands folded and her great tortoiseshell spectacles on her nose, taking her afternoon nap.  A volume of Waverley lay beside her.  Into her own white little room Winsome went, and laid the bundle of books in the bottom of the wall-press, which was lined with sheets of the Cairn Edward Miscellany.  She looked at it some time before she shut the door.

“His name is Ralph,” she said.  “I wonder how old he is—­I shall know tomorrow, because he will come back; but—­I would like to know tonight.”

She sighed a little—­so light a breath that it was only the dream of a sigh.  Then she looked at the lilac sunbonnet, as if it ought to have known.

“At any rate he has very good taste,” she said.

But the lilac sunbonnet said never a word.

CHAPTER IV.

A cavalier Puritan.

The farm town of Craig Ronald drowsed in the quiet of noon.  In the open court the sunshine triumphed, and only the purple-grey marsh mallows along the side of the house under the windows gave any sign of life.  In them the bees had begun to hum at earliest dawn, an hour and a half before the sun looked over the crest of Ben Gairn.  They were humming busily still.  In all the chambers of the house there was the same reposeful stillness.  Through them Winsome Charteris moved with free, light step.  She glanced in to see that her grandfather and grandmother were wanting for nothing in their cool and wide sitting-room, where the brown mahogany-cased eight-day clock kept up an unequal ticking, like a man walking upon two wooden legs of which one is shorter than the other.

It said something for Winsome Charteris and her high-hearted courage, that what she was accustomed to see in that sitting-room had no effect upon her spirits.  It was a pleasant room enough, with two windows looking to the south—­little round-budded, pale-petalled monthly roses nodding and peeping within the opened window-frames.  Sweet it was with a great peace, every chair covered with old sprigged chintz, flowers of the wood and heather from the hill set in china vases about it.  The room where the old folk dwelt at Craig Ronald was fresh within as is the dew on sweetbrier.  Fresh, too, was the apparel of her grandmother, the flush of youth yet on her delicate cheek, though the Psalmist’s limit had long been passed for her.

As Winsome looked within,