“But I must find lodgings—­” interrupted Ralph.

“You must find nothing—­just bide here.  It is the house of your nearest kin, and the fittest place for you.  Your meat’s neither here nor there, and my lasses—­”

“They are the best and kindest in the world,” said Ralph.

The professor glanced at him with a sharp, quizzical look under his eyebrows.  He seemed as if he were about to say something, and then thought better of it and did not.  Perhaps he also had had his illusions.

As Ralph was going to his room that night Kezia met him at the head of the stairs.  She came like a flash from nowhere in particular.

“Good-night, Ralph,” she said; “give your Winsome a kiss from me—­ the new kind—­like this!”

Then Kezia vanished, and Ralph was left wondering, with his candle in his hand.

CHAPTER XL.

A triangular conversation.

It was the day of the fast before the Communion in the Dullarg.  The services of the day were over, and Allan Welsh, the minister of the Marrow kirk, was resting in his study from his labours.  Manse Bell came up and knocked, inclining her ear as she did so to catch the minister’s low-toned reply.

“Mistress Winifred Charteris frae the Craig Ronald to see ye, sir.”

Allan Welsh commanded his emotion without difficulty—­what of it he felt—­as indeed he had done for many years.

He rose, however, with his hand on the table as though for support, as Winsome came in.  He received her in silence, bending over her hand with a certain grave reverence.

Winsome sat down.  She was a little paler but even lovelier in the minister’s eyes than when he had seen her before.  The faint violet shadows under her lower lids were deeper, and gave a new depth to her sapphire eyes whose irises were so large that the changeful purple lights in them came and went like summer lightnings.

It was Winsome who first spoke, looking at him with a strange pity and a stirring of her soul that she could not account for.  She had come unwillingly on her errand, disliking him as the cause of her lover’s absence—­one of the last things a woman learns to forgive.  But, as she looked on Allan Welsh, so bowed and broken, his eyes fallen in, looking wistfully out of the pain of his life, her heart went out to him, even as she thought that of a truth he was Ralph Peden’s enemy.

“My grandfather,” she said, and her voice was low, equable, and serious, “sent me with a packet to you that he instructed me only to give into your own hands.”

Winsome went over to the minister and gave him a sealed parcel.  Allan Welsh took it in his hand and seemed to weigh it.

“I thank you,” he said, commanding his voice with some difficulty.  “And I ask you to thank Walter Skirving for his remembrance of me.  It is many years since we were driven apart, but I have not forgotten the kindness of the long ago!”