I knew that the Yule Fair was going on down in the village, and that on account of it all Eden Valley was in an uproar. The clamour was deafening at the lower end of the “clachan,” where most of the show folk congregated. The rooks were cawing belatedly in the tall ashes round the big square—into which, in the old times of the Annandale thieves, the country folk used to drive the cattle to be out of the way of Johnstones and Jardines.

I skirted the town, therefore, so as not to meet with the full blast of the riot. With such an unruly gang about, I kept Charlotte Anderson well in sight till I saw her safe into Miss Seraphina’s. Of course, nobody who knew her for a daughter of Fighting Rob of Birkenbog would have laid hand upon her, but at such a time there might be some who did not know the repute of her father.

The great gong in front of the “Funny Folks” booth went “Bang! bang!” Opposite, the fife and drum spoke for the temple of the legitimate drama. At the selling-stalls importunate vendors of tin-ware rattled their stock-in-trade and roared at the world in general, as if buyers could be forced to attend to the most noisy—which, indeed, they mostly did.

From the dusky kennels in which the gipsies told fortunes and mended the rush-bottomed chairs of the Valley goodwives came over the wall a faint odour of mouldy hay, which lingered for weeks about every apartment to which any of their goods were admitted.As for me, I had had enough of girls for one day, and I was wondering how best to cut across the fields, take a turn about the town, and so get home to my father’s by the wood of pines behind the school, when suddenly a voice dropped upon me that fairly stunned me, so unexpected it was.

“Mr. Duncan MacAlpine,” it said, “I congratulate you on your choice of a father-in-law. You could not have done better!”

It was Miss Irma herself, taking a walk in a place where at such a time she had no business to be—on the little farm path that skirts the woods above the town. Louis was with her, but I thought that in the far distance I could discern the lounging shadow of the faithful Eben.

I stood speechless straight before her, but she passed on, lightly switching the crisped brown stalks of last year’s thistles with a little wand she had brought. I saw that she did not mean to speak to me, and I turned desperately to accompany her.

“I will thank you to pass your way,” she said sharply. “I am glad you are to have such a wife and such a dowry. Also a father-in-law who will be at the kind trouble of paying your college fees till you are quite ready to marry his daughter. It is a thing not much practised among gentlefolk, but, what with being so much with your mantua-makers, you will doubtless not know any better!”

“Irma—Irma,” I cried, not caring any more for Eben, now in the nearer distance, “it is all a mistake—indeed, a mistake from the beginning!”

“Very possibly,” she returned, with an airy haughtiness; “at any rate, it is no mistake of mine!”

And there, indeed, she had me. I had perforce to shift my ground.“I am not going to marry Charlotte Anderson,” I said.

“Then the more shame of you to deceive her after all!” she cried. “It seems that you make a habit of it! Surely I am the last person to whom you ought to boast of that!”

“On the contrary, you are the first!”

But she passed on her way, her head high, an invincible lightness in the spring of every footstep, a splash of scarlet berries making a star among her dark hair, and humming the graceless lilt which told how—

“Willie’s ga’en to Melville Castle,
Boots an’ spurs an’ a’—!”

As for me, I was ready to sink deep into the ground with despondency, wishful to rise never more. But I stopped, and though Uncle Eben was almost opposite to me, and within thirty yards, I called after her, “The day will come, Irma Maitland, when you will be sorry for the injustice you are doing!”

For I thought of how she would feel when Charlotte told about her cousin Tam Gallaberry and all that I had done for them—though, indeed, it was mostly by accident. Only I could trust Charlotte to keep her thumb upon that part of it.

I did not know what she felt then, nor, perhaps, do I quite know yet; but she caught a tangle of wild cut-leafed ivy from a tree on which I had long watched it grow, and with a spray of small green leaves she crowned herself, and so departed as she had come, singing as if she had not a care in the world, or as if I, Duncan MacAlpine, were the last and least of all.

And yet I judged that there might be a message for me in that very act. She had escaped me, and yet there was something warm in her heart in spite of all. Perhaps, who knows, an angel had gone down and troubled the waters; nor did I think, somehow, that any other would step in there before me.

After that I went down to see Fred Esquillant, who listened with sad yet brilliant eyes to my tangled tale.

“You are the lucky one,” I said, “to have nothing to do with the lasses. See what trouble they lead you into.”

He broke out suddenly.

“Be honest, Duncan,” he said, “if you must boast! If you are bound to lie, let it not be to me. You would not have it otherwise. You would not be as I am, not for all the gold of earth. No”—he held his breath a long while—“no, and I, if I had the choice, would I not give all that I have, or am ever likely to have, for—but no, I’m a silent Scot, and I canna speak the word——”

“I’m the other sort of Scot,” I cried, “and I’ll speak it for you. Man, it’s the first decent human thing I have ever heard come out o’ your mouth. You would give all for LOVE!”

“Oh, man,” he cried, snatching his fingers to his ears as if I blasphemed, “are ye not feared?”

“No, I’m not,” I declared, truly enough; “what for should I be feared? Of a lassie? Tell a lassie—that ye—that ye——”

“No, no,” cried Fred Esquillant, “not again!”

“Well, then, that ye ‘like’ her—we will let it go at that. She will want ye to say the other, but at least that will do to begin on. And come, tell me now, what’s to hinder ye, Fred?”

“Oh, everything,” he said; “it’s just fair shameless the way folk can bring themselves to speak openly of suchlike things!”

“And where would you have been, my lad, if once on a day your faither had not telled your mither that she was bonny?”“I don’t know, and as little do I care,” he cried.

“Well, then,” said I, “there’s Amaryllis—what about her?”

“That’s Latin,” said Fred, waving his arm.

“And there’s Ruth, and the lass in the Song of Solomon!”

“That’s in the Bible,” he murmured, as if he thought no better of the Sacred Word for giving a place to such frivolities.

“Fred,” I said, “tell me what you would be at? Would you have all women slain like the babes of Bethlehem, or must we have you made into a monk and locked in a cell with only a book and an inkhorn and a quill?”

“Neither,” he said; “but—oh, man, there is something awesome, coarse-grained and common in the way the like o’ you speak about women.”

“Aye, do ye tell me that?” I said to try him; “coarse, maybe, as our father Adam, when he tilled his garden, and common as the poor humanity that is yet of his flesh and blood.”

“There ye go!” he cried; “I knew well that my words were thrown away.”

“Speak up, Mr. Lily Fingers,” I answered; “let us hear what sort of a world you would have without love—and men and women to make it.”

“It would be like that in which dwell the angels of heaven—where there is neither marrying nor giving in marriage!”

“Well,” said I, “speaking for myself and most lads like me, we will mend our ways before we get a chance of trying that far country! And in the meantime here we are—our feet in the mire, and our heads not so very near the sky. Talk of angels—where are we to get their society? And the likest to them that I have ever heard tell of are just women—good women, innocent lasses, beginning to feel the stir of their own power—and all the better and the stronger are they for that! Oh, Fred, I saw an angel within the last half-hour! There she stood, her eyes shooting witcheries, poised for flight like a butterfly, the dimples playing hide-and-seek on her face, and her whole soul and body saying to the sons of men, ‘Come, seek me on your knees—you know you can’t help loving me! It is very good for you to worship me!”

“And you are not ashamed, Duncan MacAlpine, to speak such words?”

“Oh, ye Lallan Scot!” I cried; “ye Westland stot! Is there no hot blood of the Celt in you? What brought you to Galloway, where the Celt sits on every hill-top, names every farm and lea-rig, and lights his Baal-fires about the standing stones on St. John’s Eve?”

“Man,” said Fred, shaking his head, “I aye thought ye were a barbarian. Now I know it. If you had your way, you would raid your neighbours’ womenfolk and bring them in by the hair of their heads, trailing them two at a time. For me, I worship them like stars, standing afar off.”

“Aye,” said I, “that would be a heap of use to the next generation, and the lasses themselves would like it weel!”

But what Freddy Esquillant said about the next generation was unworthy of him, and certainly shall not sully this philosophic page. Besides, he spake in his haste.

All the same, I noticed that, if ever any of the stars came near to his earth, it would be a certain very moderately brilliant planet, bearing the name of Agnes Anne or, more scientifically, MacAlpine Minima, which would attract Master Fred’s reluctant worship.