“Shucks, he needn’t worry a morsel over that.  Seth’ll quiet down as soon as he finds he can’t run the Master.  He’s a rare good teacher—­better’n Mr. West was even, and that’s saying something.  The trustees are hoping he’ll stay for another term.  They’re going to ask him at the school meeting to-morrow, and offer him a raise of supplement.”

Upstairs, in his little room under the eaves, Eric Marshall was in the grip of the most intense and overwhelming emotion he had ever experienced.

Up and down, to and fro, he walked, with set lips and clenched hands.  When he was wearied out he flung himself on a chair by the window and wrestled with the flood of feeling.

Mrs. Williamson’s words had torn away the delusive veil with which he had bound his eyes.  He was face to face with the knowledge that he loved Kilmeny Gordon with the love that comes but once, and is for all time.  He wondered how he could have been so long blind to it.  He knew that he must have loved her ever since their first meeting that May evening in the old orchard.

And he knew that he must choose between two alternatives—­either he must never go to the orchard again, or he must go as an avowed lover to woo him a wife.

Worldly prudence, his inheritance from a long line of thrifty, cool-headed ancestors, was strong in Eric, and he did not yield easily or speedily to the dictates of his passion.  All night he struggled against the new emotions that threatened to sweep away the “common sense” which David Baker had bade him take with him when he went a-wooing.  Would not a marriage with Kilmeny Gordon be an unwise thing from any standpoint?

Then something stronger and greater and more vital than wisdom or unwisdom rose up in him and mastered him.  Kilmeny, beautiful, dumb Kilmeny was, as he had once involuntarily thought, “the one maid” for him.  Nothing should part them.  The mere idea of never seeing her again was so unbearable that he laughed at himself for having counted it a possible alternative.

“If I can win Kilmeny’s love I shall ask her to be my wife,” he said, looking out of the window to the dark, southwestern hill beyond which lay his orchard.

The velvet sky over it was still starry; but the water of the harbour was beginning to grow silvery in the reflection of the dawn that was breaking in the east.

“Her misfortune will only make her dearer to me.  I cannot realize that a month ago I did not know her.  It seems to me that she has been a part of my life for ever.  I wonder if she was grieved that I did not go to the orchard last night—­if she waited for me.  If she does, she does not know it herself yet.  It will be my sweet task to teach her what love means, and no man has ever had a lovelier, purer, pupil.”

At the annual school meeting, the next afternoon, the trustees asked Eric to take the Lindsay school for the following year.  He consented unhesitatingly.