Nearly a month had gone by since Marjory Carmichael had whispered to the darkness, "Come back to me, Paul, and we will forget our love." The sudden awakening to the realities, not only of life but of her own nature, caused by his reckless avowal of love, had passed, as all awakenings must, into calm acquiescence in the commonplace facts of consciousness. There was no denying of the truth possible to her clear sight, and as she sate on the last day of October, on the last day of holiday before she and little Paul set off together to make acquaintance with a new world, she laid down her pen in the middle of a sentence in the letter she was writing to Tom Kennedy, and looked out over the stormy whitecrested waves of the loch set in its rampart of grey, snow-powdered, mist-shrouded hills, and wondered how she could have been so blind for so long. Blind to half the great problems of life! And then, with a smile, infinitely sweeter than it used to be because infinitely stronger, she took up a letter which lay beside her, and leaning back in her chair began to read it over again, just as she had re-read a letter down by the river side three months before, on the day when her holiday began--on the day when she had first seen Paul Macleod.

But it was a very different letter from the one Dr. Kennedy had sent her then; for all unconsciously the girl, in the first bewilderment of her awakening, had stretched out her hands to him, as it were, for help, and he had given her what he could, smiling a trifle bitterly as he wrote to think how little that was. "You ask me to tell you the truth," she read, "but how can I when I do not know it myself? If I had, the world might have been different--for us both. Only this seems clear, that friendship is a bigger thing than love, unless they both grow from the same root, and then--I fancy, Mademoiselle Grands-serieux, that the botanists ought to characterise the product as a sport! It is rare enough--God knows! I have sate for hours over the puzzle, trying to get at the bottom of myself, only to come back to the old paradox that Love is not worth calling Love unless it is something which is not Love. And that is no solution. Pure and simple, unveiled of mist and sentiment, it is all too easy of explanation. It is ever-present, and must be so--it seems--till the end of all things. Then there is--shall we call it the transcendental form conceivable only to those who recognise some innate, or almost innate, sense of order or beauty in mankind. That too, given this premise, is easy. I believe I understand it. I am sure you do. It is the hybrid of these two held up to our admiration, and believed in by the majority of cultivated people, which beats me altogether. Look round you, dear, and think for yourself. A man and a woman have mental sympathy with each other. What has that to do with marriage? A man and a woman are married. What has that to do with mental sympathy? The two things are not incompatibles. Heaven forbid! But have friendship and what the world calls love any real connection, and what part have they to play in marriage? That sounds like a conundrum, and perhaps it is as well, since we were getting too serious, and that is a fatal mistake when there is no answer to the riddle. But there is a sacrilegious little story, my dear, regarding the reasons for not enforcing celibacy on the clergy, which is not altogether irrelevant to our subject. Luther, I believe, is responsible for declaring that marriage is a 'discipline' not to be surpassed in spiritual efficacy; a discipline before which hair shirts and flagellations are sensual indulgence. N.B.--Was Luther any relation of the Cornish man who said, 'Women was like pilchards; when 'ums bad 'ms bad, and when 'ms good they is but middlin'?' I beg your pardon, Mademoiselle G.S., but one must laugh--if one is not to cry. What if love were the mutual attraction of certain elements, which combined and neutralised in the children, would go to form a more useful compound of humanity? Would not this go further towards raising our instincts out of the mire than all the romance in the world? And then it would account, of course--since chemicals are apt to evolve heat in combining--for a good deal of friction in the married state, which in its turn must polish the sufferers! But as this theory canonises Mrs. Caudle, and makes wife-beating a virtue, perhaps we had better change the subject by saying, as we said at the beginning--friendship is a bigger thing than love, and so pass on to the lives we have to lead, love or no love."

So with kindly thought, and a plentiful humour irradiating every page, he went on to tell her of his work, of stirring scenes in that hand-to-hand fight with Death, the great enemy of Love, in which he lived. A tender, charming letter, such as his were always. Letters which none know how to write save those who, despising the control of time and space, have learnt to lean over the edge of the world, and claim a part in some far-off life. Letters which, without one word of sentiment from beginning to end, leave both the writer's and reader's hearts full of a great kindliness and peace.

They set Marjory a thinking, as they were meant to do, and the result was good, since her clear common sense never failed her. Yet side by side with that common sense existed a certain fanciful idealism, which took the place of the former in matters beyond the limits of plain reason. And this, as she read, made her pause to wonder if Tom could be right, and the calm content which came to her from him, so different from the unrest which the mere thought of Paul produced, meant that they were too nearly akin to need neutralisation. Then she laid down the letter and took up the pen again, striving unconsciously to imitate his playful touch.

"No, Tom!" she wrote; "I am not growing morbid. I am not, as you call it, trying to measure my world with home-made imitations of the imperial quart; still, I do wish I knew what the cubit was! Then I would add it to my stature and rise superior--perhaps. If I had known what I know now when my holiday began would it have made any difference? If I had had a mother, if I had been brought up with other girls, should I have gone on as I did, using a wrong terminology? I will tell you something, Tom. What I thought was love in those old days is just what I feel for you, dear. Perhaps I might have thought so all my life if I had not met him. And now, if I meet him again, Tom, what will happen? I sit down before the proposition; but it is not to be solved like a problem in Euclid, because I have discovered that my heart and my brain are quite separate, and I used to think they were both a part of me. Don't tell me, please, that I am wrong. Perhaps I am physiologically. I know all about that horrid little V-shaped spot in the medulla oblongata, isn't it, where a pin-point will stop Tears and Laughter, Love and Friendship for ever. What then? Does it make it easier to understand why the heart beats, to know that we can stop its beating? I wish I knew! I wish I knew! I don't want it to beat, but it will. Oh! what a mercy it is that we two do not love each other!"

She laid down the pen as a knock came to the door.

"A strange shentlemen to see Miss Carmichael," said the new servant who had replaced the peccant Kirsty discovered--direful offence--in putting a dirty skimmer into the milk.

Now, in the country a "strange gentleman" generally resolves itself into the piano-tuner, so Marjory bade him be shown up with a certain calm impatience at the necessity for explaining that his services would not be wanted; then, the thread of her thoughts broken rudely, she sate waiting, her eyes fixed absently on the words, "that we two do not love each other!"

She looked up from them to see Paul Macleod standing at the door. He had come back to her!

Five minutes before she had asked, almost passionately, of her friend what she would do in such case. Now there was but one answer.

"Paul!" Her outstretched hand sought his, as he stood tall and straight trying to master his emotion, to preserve the calm to which he had schooled himself through the long journey which had ended here--here, where he might once have found rest; here, where all, save such self-respect as apology might leave him, was lost for ever.

"Paul--Oh! how tired you look--how cold your hands are! Come, dear--come and warm yourself; you must be perished!"

He did not speak, perhaps because the hoar frost of pride which had chilled his eyes melted before the radiance of hers; and hoar frost is but water after all. So she drew him to the fire, and then, still holding one hand as if loth to lose touch of it, knelt on one knee to stir the peats to a brighter blaze.

"I'm so glad you have come back," she said, with a little tremble in her voice; "so glad!" And then she looked up suddenly into the face above her, surprised at the almost painful strength of his grip. For Paul Macleod's composure was almost gone, and he was struggling hard for self-control. What she saw kept her silent; but she bent towards him till her soft, warm cheek touched his hand caressingly. The action, with its tale of tender solicitude, its boundless sympathy, was too much for him. He drew in his breath hard, and resting his arm on the mantelpiece turned from her to hide his face upon it, and so escape the pity in her eyes.

And he had dreamed of something so different! Of something coldly just, reasonably reproachful! Without a word she had guessed, had known, that he must be free to come, because he had come back.

"What is it, dear?" she asked softly, as she stood beside him. "Are you afraid that I am angry? Are you afraid that I care--about that? Paul! I do not choose to care--I will not. Look at me, and you will see if that is not the truth!"

What he saw was a face soft with the passion he knew so well--the passion which lies so perilously close to self--which claims so much, and resents so easily. But it was radiant also, as with a white flame of cleansing fire, pitiless in its purity.

"What is it to me?" she went on, her voice ringing clearer. "What is it to any woman unless she stoops to care? Oh! I understand now, Paul--I understand things of which I never even dreamed before; things which have been in your life--things which might have been in mine, perhaps--God knows!--if I had been in your place. But they are no more to me than this--a grief, a regret, because they are a stain upon your past, as all wrong must be. They are no more to me than that, because I do not choose to count them more!"

So, with a smile in her eyes, and a quiver of pain on her lips, she raised her face to his and kissed him.

Thus neither humiliation nor forgiveness was allowed a part in this woman's reading of the Divine Comedy. Perhaps she was wrong, and yet no scorn, no righteous indignation, could have made Paul Macleod feel more acutely the gulf which lay between his past and hers. Between their futures also. They might be friends, but from that pure Love of hers he was for ever outcast, though she might not know it--though he might spend his life in trying to conceal the fact that he lived on a lower plane than she did. Why! the past was with him now, even at the touch of her lips. He loved her, as he had loved so often before.

"Marjory!" he cried passionately, "I don't deserve it, but I can't miss it--if you will put up with me?"

She drew herself away, and looked at him with a half-tender, half-mocking expression.

"Put up with you? What else is there to be done now that you have come back to me?"

What else, indeed! She was right; it was he who had taken the responsibility, he who defied natural consequences in this dreaming of something beyond and above his past. He was not hardened enough to be blind to this, and the thought showed on his face.

"Come," she said consolingly, "sit down and tell me all about it--why you came back, I mean; I know why you went away."

If she did, he felt that she was wiser than he, since, sitting so beside her, sure of her sympathy, her confidence, it seemed incredible that he should have fled from this sure haven of his own free will. He told her all, it seemed to him without a pang; told her of his dismissal, of the change in his prospects. Yet, when he put Jeanie Duncan's letter into her hands, and walked away to the window while she read it, he felt more of a cur than he had ever done in all his life before. What would the girl say? What could she say but that it served him right? If she dismissed him also, and told him that she did not care to exchange her love for his, would not that serve him right also!

And so, as he stood frowning moodily at the growing glint of sunshine far out in the West driving the mists in dense masses up the Glen, her voice came to him as she laid down the letter with a sigh:

"I am glad she called him Paul."

He turned quickly to her in a sort of incredulous amaze! Was that all she had to say? A sort of chill crept over him, even though he found himself at her feet, with her hands in his, kissing them softly as he told her, with a break in his voice, that she was too good--too good for any man. The thought brought him a certain consolation, as she went on, evidently with the desire of taking all sting from his memories--to speak of the strange coincidence of little Paul's devotion to her, and of her liking for the lovable little lad. Surely, if Gleneira had to go, he would far rather it went to him than to some stranger, who would care nothing for her and her ways.

"Why?" she said, a trifle tearfully; "he has been so much with me lately, since old Peggy died, that I felt quite lost without him when he went yesterday for a farewell visit up the Glen to the Macintoshes. The boys were his great playmates. So you see, Paul, it will not matter so much, for he will live with us, of course, and it is a long, long time before he comes of age. And even then I don't believe he will turn you out of house and home altogether. We will teach him better things than that! Won't we?"

In truth, spoken of in her calm, clear voice, and with her wise eyes on his, and that sweet convincing "we" in her phrases, the prospect did not seem so hopeless. Yet he caught himself wishing that she had not taken his renunciation quite so much as a matter of course; wishing that she appreciated his victory over temptation more keenly. Yet, how could she, when he had not told her that part of the business, or how near he had been to purchasing peace with dishonour by destroying Jeanie Duncan's letter and the marriage certificate it contained. But there were many things in his past, he told himself, with a sigh, of which it was better she should continue to know nothing; for her own sake, not for his. He could scarcely fear her blame, and it would have been a certain comfort to, as it were, bring her closer to him by confession. But Paul Macleod was too much of a gentleman for that kind of self-indulgence, and he was realising for the first time in his life the supreme impotence of repentance either in the past or the future. Had he not, even at the time, repented him of the evil in regard to Jeanie Duncan; yet had not a Nemesis grown out of his very repentance?

"Come with me part of the way back, dear," he said, when the necessity for writing business letters broke through even his desire to linger within touch of her kind hand. "I can't bear somehow to lose sight of you for an instant, but I must go--there are the lawyers--and Dr. Kennedy."

"I can tell Tom if you like," replied Marjory. "I write to him most days."

Something rose up in her hearer and cursed Tom, though the next moment he was reviling himself. That sort of thing would have to be put away for ever when he was Marjory's husband.

"You will have to marry me as soon as you can," he said, with what to her seemed great irrelevance.

"I will marry you as soon as you like, Paul; you know that," she replied cheerfully.

Yes! so far was easy; but afterwards? How would she ever put up with him? Yet the question was once more forgotten in the charm of the present.

It was the end of a soft day, and the summitless mountains looked purple and green under the mist wreaths which every now and again seemed to descend to fill the valley and leave sparkling drops of dew on the little curls below Marjory's cap, while the river ran roaring beside them, making a kind of droning accompaniment to the shriller drip from the trees upon the stones. Then the fine rain would cease, the birds begin to twitter, rustling the damp leaves, and sending a faster shower on the path; while from the West a gleaming blade of light would sever the mists, and give a glimpse of a new heaven and a new earth, where the sun was setting peacefully.

As she walked along beside him, her face seemed to hold the sunshine, his the mist, and once, in the middle of some talk over the future, he paused to hark back to the past.

"If we could begin it all over again from the day I first met you on the river, I think I might have a better chance--at least, I would not play the fool so utterly--at least, my memories of you would be free from pain--and I should have left undone the things that I have done."

"Why should you say that?" she asked. "Is it not enough that what you did made me love you?"

"Your godfathers and godmothers should have christened you Barnabasina," he replied, with an effort after his old, light manner, "for you are verily a daughter of consolation, Marjory; but even you cannot take the sting out of some things. If I could have the past over again! Nothing short of that will satisfy me."

Her quick, bright face grew brighter.

"Then you shall have it, dear, as far as I'm concerned. Yes! you shall! It will be pleasant for me, too. Don't laugh at my fancy, for I like fancies sometimes; they help one along the dead level bits of the road. I'll say 'good-bye' here, Paul, here in the very spot where you said good-bye before--do you think I could forget it? And then to-morrow----" she hesitated in her very eagerness.

"Yes, to-morrow, Marjory?" he echoed.

"To-morrow you shall meet me at the old place on the river--you remember it, of course, and we shall begin all over again--all over again from the very beginning, to the very end. I remember them all, Paul; everything, I believe, that you ever said--everything, at any rate, that you ever said which I disliked. Is that unkind? And so when the time comes for those bits you shall not say them--we will cut them out of the past."

"It will be Hamlet with the Prince left out," he said, falling in with her playful mood.

"Not a bit of it! Besides if it were I should not mind. It was never the prince I liked, but Paul--the real Paul."

"I wonder which one that is," he replied quickly, yet with a smile; for her radiant face would not be cheated of its due.

"We shall see to-morrow--good-bye, Paul."

He shook his head.

"No! No! Marjory. Neither that, nor adieu, any more. Till to-morrow--Auf-wieder-sehn, my love! Auf-wieder-sehn."