“Once you would not tell me why your eyelashes were curled up at the ends,” said this eager Columbus of a new continent, drawing the new world nearer his heart in order that his discoveries might be truer, surer, in detail more trustworthy.  “I know now without telling.  Would you like to know, Winsome?”

Winsome drew a happy breath, nestling a little closer—­so little that no one but Ralph would have known.  But the little shook him to the depths of his soul.  This it is to be young and for the first time mastering the geography of an unknown and untraversed continent.  The unversed might have thought that light breath a sigh, but no lover could have made the mistake.  It is only in books, wordy and unreal, that lovers misunderstand each other in that way.

“I know,” said Ralph, needing no word of permission to proceed, “it is with touching your cheek when you sleep.”

“Then I must sleep a very long time!” said Winsome merrily, making light of his words.

“Underneath in the dark of either eye,” continued Ralph, who, be it not forgotten, was a poet, “I see two young things like cherubs.”

“I know,” said Winsome; “I see myself in your eyes—­you see yourself in mine.”

She paused to note the effect of this tremendous discovery.

“Then,” replied Ralph, “if it be indeed my own self I see in your eyes, it is myself as God made me at first without sin.  I do not feel at all like a cherub now, but I must have been once, if I ever was like what I see in your eyes.”

“Now go on; tell me what else you see,” said Winsome.

“Your lips—­” began Ralph, and paused.

“No, six is quite enough,” said Winsome, after a little while, mysteriously.  She had only two, and Ralph only two; yet she said with little grammar and no sense at all, “Six is enough.”

But a voice from quite other lips came over the rising background of scrub and tangled thicket.

“Gang on coortin’,” it said; “I’m no lookin’, an’ I canna see onything onyway.”

It was Jock Gordon.  He continued: 

“Jock Scott’s gane hame till his breakfast.  He’ll no bother ye this mornin’, sae coort awa’.”

CHAPTEE XXXV.

Such sweet sorrow.

Winsome and Ralph laughed, but Winsome sat up and put straight her sunbonnet.  Sunbonnets are troublesome things.  They will not stick on one’s head.  Manse Bell contradicts this.  She says that her sunbonnet never comes off, or gets pushed back.  As for other people’s, lasses are not what they were in her young days.

“I must go home,” said Winsome; “they will miss me.”

“You know that it is ‘good-bye,’ then,” said Ralph.

“What!” said Winsome, “shall I not see you to-morrow?” the bright light of gladness dying out of her eye.  And the smile drained down out of her cheek like the last sand out of the sand-glass.

“No,” said Ralph quietly, keeping his eyes full on hers, “I cannot go back to the manse after what was said.  It is not likely that I shall ever be there again.”