“To see my grandmother,” said Winsome, with a touch of archness in her tone or in her look—­Ralph could not tell which, though he eyed her closely.  He wished for the first time that the dark-brown eyelashes which fringed her lids were not so long.  He fancied that, if he could only have seen the look in the eyes hidden underneath, he might have risked changing to the other side of the unkindly frontier of fir-bough which marked him off from the land of promise on the farther side.

But he could not see, and in a moment the chances were past.

“Not only to see your grandmother, who has been very kind to me, but also to see you, who have not been at all kind to me,” answered Ralph.

“And pray, Master Ralph Peden, how have I not been kind to you?” said Winsome with dignity, giving him the full benefit of a pair of apparently reproachful eyes across the fir-branch.

Now Ralph had strange impulses, and, like Winsome, certainly did not talk by rule.

“I do wish,” he said complainingly, with his head a little to one side, “that you would only look at me with one eye at a time.  Two like that are too much for a man.”

This is that same Ralph Peden whose opinions on woman were written in a lost note-book which at this present moment is—­we shall not say where.

CHAPTER XXVI.

Such sweet peril.

Winsome looked away down the glen, and strove to harden her face into a superhuman indignation.

“That he should dare—­the idea!”

But it so happened that the idea so touched that rare gift of humour, and the picture of herself looking at Ralph Peden solemnly with one eye at a time, in order at once to spare his susceptibilities and give the other a rest, was too much for her.  She laughed a peal of rippling merriment that sent all the blackbirds indignant out of their copses at the infringement of their prerogative.

Ralph’s humour was slower and a little grimmer than Winsome’s, whose sunny nature had blossomed out amid the merry life of the woods and streams.  But there was a sternness in both of them as well, that was of the heather and the moss hags.  And that would in due time come out.  It is now their day of love and bounding life.  And there are few people in this world who would not be glad to sit just so at the opening of the flower of love.  Indeed, it was hardly necessary to tell one another.

Laughter, say the French (who think that their l’amour is love, and so will never know anything), kills love.  But not the kind of laughter that rang in the open dell which peeped like the end of a great green-lined prospect glass upon the glimmering levels of Loch Grannoch; nor yet the kind of love which in alternate currents pulsed to and fro between the two young people who sat so demurely on either side of the great, many-spiked fir-branch.