To those two in the old orchard it mattered not a whit.  Kilmeny knew nothing of gossip.  To her, Lindsay was as much of an unknown world as the city of Eric’s home.  Her thoughts strayed far and wide in the realm of her fancy, but they never wandered out to the little realities that hedged her strange life around.  In that life she had blossomed out, a fair, unique thing.  There were times when Eric almost regretted that one day he must take her out of her white solitude to a world that, in the last analysis, was only Lindsay on a larger scale, with just the same pettiness of thought and feeling and opinion at the bottom of it.  He wished he might keep her to himself for ever, in that old, spruce-hidden orchard where the roses fell.

One day he indulged himself in the fulfillment of the whim he had formed when Kilmeny had told him she thought herself ugly.  He went to Janet and asked her permission to bring a mirror to the house that he might have the privilege of being the first to reveal Kilmeny to herself exteriorly.  Janet was somewhat dubious at first.

“There hasn’t been such a thing in the house for sixteen years, Master.  There never was but three—­one in the spare room, and a little one in the kitchen, and Margaret’s own.  She broke them all the day it first struck her that Kilmeny was going to be bonny.  I might have got one after she died maybe.  But I didn’t think of it; and there’s no need of lasses to be always prinking at their looking glasses.”

But Eric pleaded and argued skilfully, and finally Janet said,

“Well, well, have your own way.  You’d have it anyway I think, lad.  You are one of those men who always get their own way.  But that is different from the men who take their own way—­and that’s a mercy,” she added under her breath.

Eric went to town the next Saturday and picked out a mirror that pleased him.  He had it shipped to Radnor and Thomas Gordon brought it home, not knowing what it was, for Janet had thought it just as well he should not know.

“It’s a present the Master is making Kilmeny,” she told him.

She sent Kilmeny off to the orchard after tea, and Eric slipped around to the house by way of the main road and lane.  He and Janet together unpacked the mirror and hung it on the parlour wall.

“I never saw such a big one, Master,” said Janet rather doubtfully, as if, after all, she distrusted its gleaming, pearly depth and richly ornamented frame.  “I hope it won’t make her vain.  She is very bonny, but it may not do her any good to know it.”

“It won’t harm her,” said Eric confidently.  “When a belief in her ugliness hasn’t spoiled a girl a belief in her beauty won’t.”

But Janet did not understand epigrams.  She carefully removed a little dust from the polished surface, and frowned meditatively at the by no means beautiful reflection she saw therein.

“I cannot think what made Kilmeny suppose she was ugly, Master.”