“Kilmeny, dear, don’t cry,” said Eric tenderly.  “You shall see me again.  I promise you that, whatever happens.  I do not think your uncle and aunt will be as unreasonable as you fear, but even if they are they shall not prevent me from meeting you somehow.”

Kilmeny lifted her head, and wiped the tears from her eyes.

“You do not know what they are like,” she wrote.  “They will lock me into my room.  That is the way they always punished me when I was a little girl.  And once, not so very long ago, when I was a big girl, they did it.”

“If they do I’ll get you out somehow,” said Eric, laughing a little.

She allowed herself to smile, but it was a rather forlorn little effort.  She did not cry any more, but her spirits did not come back to her.  Eric talked gaily, but she only listened in a pensive, absent way, as if she scarcely heard him.  When he asked her to play she shook her head.

“I cannot think any music to-night,” she wrote, “I must go home, for my head aches and I feel very stupid.”

“Very well, Kilmeny.  Now, don’t worry, little girl.  It will all come out all right.”

Evidently she did not share his confidence, for her head drooped again as they walked together across the orchard.  At the entrance of the wild cherry lane she paused and looked at him half reproachfully, her eyes filling again.  She seemed to be bidding him a mute farewell.  With an impulse of tenderness which he could not control, Eric put his arm about her and kissed her red, trembling mouth.  She started back with a little cry.  A burning colour swept over her face, and the next moment she fled swiftly up the darkening lane.

The sweetness of that involuntary kiss clung to Eric’s lips as he went homeward, half-intoxicating him.  He knew that it had opened the gates of womanhood to Kilmeny.  Never again, he felt, would her eyes meet his with their old unclouded frankness.  When next he looked into them he knew that he should see there the consciousness of his kiss.  Behind her in the orchard that night Kilmeny had left her childhood.

CHAPTER XII.  A PRISONER OF LOVE

When Eric betook himself to the orchard the next evening he had to admit that he felt rather nervous.  He did not know how the Gordons would receive him and certainly the reports he had heard of them were not encouraging, to say the least of it.  Even Mrs. Williamson, when he had told her where he was going, seemed to look upon him as one bent on bearding a lion in his den.

“I do hope they won’t be very uncivil to you, Master,” was the best she could say.

He expected Kilmeny to be in the orchard before him, for he had been delayed by a call from one of the trustees; but she was nowhere to be seen.  He walked across it to the wild cherry lane; but at its entrance he stopped short in sudden dismay.