Here she pouted her pretty lips and blew.

“One—­ha, ha!—­he was an active infant when he ran from the blanket-tramping—­two, three, four—­”

Some tiny feather-headed spikelets disengaged themselves unwillingly from the round and venerable downpolled dandelion.  They floated lazily up between the tassels of the broom upon the light breeze.

“Five, six, seven, eight—­faith, he was a clean-heeled laddie yon.  Ye couldna see his legs or coat-tails for stour as he gaed roon’ the Far Away Turn.”

Winsome was revelling in her broad Scots.  She had learned it from her grandmother.

“Nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen—­I’ll no can set the dogs on him then—­sixteen, seventeen, eighteen—­dear me, this is becoming interesting.”

The plumules were blowing off freely now, like snow from the eaves on a windy day in winter.

“Nineteen, twenty, twenty-one—­I must reverence my elders.  If I don’t blow stronger he’ll turn out to be fifty—­twenty-three, twenty-f—­”

A shadow fell across the daintily-held dandelion and lay a blue patch on the grass.  Only one pale grey star stood erect on the stem, the vacant green sheathing of the calyx turning suddenly down.

“Twenty-four!—­” said Ralph Peden quietly, standing with his hat in his hand and an eager flush on his cheek.  The last plumule floated away.

Winsome Charteris had risen instinctively, and stood looking with crimson cheeks and quicker-coming breath at this young man who came upon her in the nick of time.

He was startled and a little indignant.  So they stood facing one another while one might count a score—­silent and drinking each the other in, with that flashing transference of electric sympathy possible only to the young and the innocent.

It was the young man who spoke first.  Winsome was a little indignant that he should dare to come upon her while so engaged.  Not, of course, that she cared for a moment what he thought of her, but he ought to have known better than to have stolen upon her while she was behaving in such a ridiculous, childish way.  It showed what he was capable of.

“My name is Ralph Peden,” he said humbly.  “I came from Edinburgh the day before yesterday.  I am staying with Mr. Welsh at the manse.”

Winsome Charteris glanced down at the books and blushed still more deeply.  The Hebrew Bible and Lexicon lay harmlessly enough on the grass, and the Luther was swinging in a frivolous and untheological way on the strong, bent twigs of broom.  But where was the note-book?  Like a surge of Solway tide the remembrance came over her that, when she had plucked the dandelion for her soothsaying, she had thrust it carelessly into the bosom of her lilac-sprigged gown.  Indeed, a corner of it peeped out at this moment.  Had he seen it?—­monstrous thought!  She knew young men and the interpretations that they put upon nothings!  This, in spite of his solemn looks and mantling bashfulness, was a young man.