“I wish you would keep back your shoulders when you walk!” she said, quick as a flash, stopping and turning sideways to face Ralph Peden.

Ralph, walking thoughtfully with the student stoop, stood aghast, as though not daring to reply lest his ears had not heard aright.

“I say, why do you not keep your shoulders back?” repeated Winsome sharply, and with a kind of irritation at his silence.

He had no right to make her feel uncomfortable, whatever she might say.

“I did not know—­I thought—­nobody ever told me,” said Ralph, stammering and catching at the word which came uppermost, as he had done in college when Professor Thriepneuk, who was as fierce in the class-room as he was mild at home, had him cornered upon a quantity.

“Well, then,” said Winsome, “if every one is so blind, it is time that some one did tell you now.”

Ralph squared himself like a drill-sergeant, holding himself so straight that Winsome laughed outright, and that so merrily that Ralph laughed too, well content that the dimple on her cheek should play at hide and seek with the pink flush of her clear skin.

So they had come to the stile, and Ralph’s heart beat stronger, and a nervous tension of expectation quivered through him, bewildering his judgment.  But Winsome was very clear-headed, and though the white of her eyes was as dewy and clear as a child’s, she was no simpleton.  She had read many men and women in her time, for it is the same in essence to rule Craig Ronald as to rule Rome.

“This is your way,” she said, sitting down on the stile.  “I am going up to John Scott’s to see about the lambs.  It will be breakfast-time at the manse before you got back.”

Ralph’s castle fell to the ground.

“I will come up with you to John Scott’s,” he said with an undertone of eagerness.

“Indeed, that you will not,” said Winsome promptly, who did not want to arrive at seven o’clock in the morning at John Scott’s with any young man.  “You will go home and take to your book, after you have changed your shoes and stockings,” she said practically.

“Well, then, let me bid you good-bye, Winsome!” said Ralph.

Her heart was warm to hear him say Winsome—­for the first time.  It certainly was not unpleasant, and there was no need that she should quarrel about that.  She was about to give him her hand, when she saw something in his eye.

“Mind, you are not to kiss it as you did grannie’s yesterday; besides, there are John Scott’s dogs on the brow of the hill,” she said, pointing upward.

Poor Ralph could only look more crestfallen still.  Such knowledge was too high for him.  He fell back on his old formula: 

“I said before that you are a witch—­”

“And you say it again?” queried Winsome, with careless nonchalance, swinging her bonnet by its strings.  “Well, you can come back and kiss grannie’s hand some other day.  You are something of a favourite with her.”