"When you ran away from school," he interrupted with unexpected coldness. "I was almost inclined, when you refused to enter the carriage, to leave you on the road. If I have given you protection it is for reasons I do not care to explain. I have told you, I do not want grat.i.tude. The tie between us is a voluntary one. You are free as air, young lady, but always with a risk. Your acts will not be disobediences, though they may be imprudences. Distinctly remember you are your own mistress. Keep your secrets if you have any. I do not demand your confidence."

"Free as air!" rang through Meg's heart. "I am my own mistress; free to meet my friend again."

After this extraordinary ebullition of candor from Sir Malcolm, the old gentleman's kindness seemed to regain its late level. Meg even fancied that he was kinder, as if he endeavored thus to salve any wound to her feelings which his temporary harshness might have occasioned.

Still he had said she was free as air, and Meg now felt justified in acting as her heart impelled her. The winter came and went, but it brought no sense of dreariness or bleakness to Meg. She had found the friend of her childhood, and the reflection of her childhood's days shone over everything. It was no wonder that she felt some of the charm of the old companionship with him who had been good to her when all the world had neglected her; and the memory of whose kindness had set a halo about the memory of her forlorn life.

She asked herself no questions concerning the nature of this new interest; she knew only that until it came back to her she was as one walled in, and without daylight. The real Meg had lived captive in a state of repression; to no one had she ventured to tell her impressions; but to this friend she could speak of the most trivial event, and confide the most intimate thought. He drew her out with a frank tenderness that won her simple trust. There grew a fascination to walk and to talk with him; to tell him all that had happened to her since the day of their parting. She had never forgotten him; the thought of him had ever dwelt in her mind, ready to start up and welcome him at his coming. And although it was still her pleasure and her duty to minister to her benefactor's need, yet by his own injunction she felt herself free to yield to the refreshment and delight of those meetings.

They met at sunset, after the journalist's work was done, in the wood behind the house; and their trysting-place was an elm.

"It looks like an old wizard," said Mr. Standish, pointing to the leafless tree standing gaunt against the dying light.

"Old Merlin!" said Meg; "and there is the eerie brightness about him. He is going to throw a spell over us."

The prediction proved true; a spell was cast about Meg's life, and she loved no spot on earth as she loved the place by that tree.

No young girl ever set forth to her first ball with more expectation and longing than did Meg feel in antic.i.p.ation of some new chat with the lost friend whom she had found again. Endless, endless appeared to her the sources of interesting conversation and of sentiment that he had at his command, and each time they met and talked it seemed to her that he opened a new world of thought and imagination for her spirit to dwell in.

They had a thousand subjects to speak about. Every topic came at random.

They cared not which it was, for each seemed ever new. Meg was like a child who has never seen the sea, now picking up rainbow sh.e.l.ls by the sh.o.r.e; every sh.e.l.l different in the heap lying beside her in a glorious chance medley.

Sometimes he entertained her with scenes of travel, of striving and success. Sometimes they interchanged memories, mutually reminding each other of incidents in the past. With grave humor, followed by hearty laughter, he would describe the part she had played in some scene where she had behaved with great motherliness and dignity toward him. He would tell her how she had never despaired of him, although the bailiffs were after him.

"But I was a sad trouble to you, Meg," he vowed. "You were a little tyrant then. Where is all that tyranny gone?"

"You give me no excuse to exercise it," she replied one day. "The instinct may be there still; but you are so good, so absorbed in work now."

"Ah, if you only knew it!" he exclaimed. "Little Meg would have been more quick-sighted. She would have sternly reproved me, and preached to me about wasting my time when I should be furnishing copy."

"Copy! What is copy?" she asked.

"Blessed ignorance! Copy is that which goes to fill those columns of print. It is what the hungry printer clamors for, and looks very black when he does not get."

Meg laughed.

"You speak as if printers were wild beasts fed with leaders on schemes for extending the franchise or removing some dowdy old tax."

"Well, well, I am a humbug. All the time that I am writing these leaders I am thinking of coming to see you; I hurry through my work in order to be in time to meet you, Meg," he answered.

"Then I will meet you no more if I spoil your work," she said gravely.

"There spoke the child. All the severity of the little monitor of yore is in those accents," he replied with a laugh. "No, Meg, I work all the better to earn my play."

"Your play?" she said slowly, with a slight emphasis on the word; and she was silent awhile. The expression remained with her, casting its little shadow of doubt, and she would harp back upon it.

"Is this your play?" she would question gravely, when he said anything complimentary.

They had their merry wrangles, their desperate fallings-out, their pretty makings-up. Meg, with characteristic repartees, parried his thrusts, and their intercourse was sweet with wholesome laughter. With a blunt playfulness she met anything approaching to sentiment.

"While I was waiting," he said one day, "there was a little bird up there--you'll hear it--which continually says, 'She'll come! she'll come!'"

"And I heard a cuckoo in the wood as I came along," she replied; "he cried nothing but 'Copy! copy! copy!'"

"It must have been the printer's devil," he said, "when I was taking a holiday."

An innocent coquetry, which was the simple outcome of delight in her ever-growing happiness, would tinge her manner with a little salt of aggressiveness. She sometimes played at making him jealous.

She was late one day; she had been detained, she explained, by a fascinating being.

"Who was he?"

She would not tell his name, but vowed he had splendid l.u.s.trous eyes, and a mustache an officer in the guards might envy.

Mr. Standish laughed, and seemed inclined to turn the conversation to another topic.

"You do not ask his name," she said; "yet this fascinating creature made me late, and with difficulty I tore myself from his spell."

"But you came," he replied, falling into her mood.

"My sense of duty. I am naturally punctual. I push it to a weakness."

"I wish to forget him," he said; "he has robbed me enough. What is the name of the country b.u.mpkin?"

"Country b.u.mpkin, indeed! He wears a coat the fit of which the most fashionable tailor might well envy the secret of its cut--a coat black and glossy, with just a touch of white at the throat."

"The rector. I knew it. Confess it is the rector," Mr. Standish said with finger uplifted.

"No white-haired rector, indeed," said Meg.

"Then the curate? All the ladies are fascinated by the curate."

"Not the curate. My charmer is an inmate of the house."

"An inmate?" repeated Mr. Standish, perplexed.

"On the day of my arrival he was so pleasant and cordial his greeting almost made me feel at home."

"I wonder who he is!" said Mr. Standish.

"As you look troubled, I will be generous and tell you," said Meg, and paused.

"Well," said Mr. Standish, "who is he?"

"My charmer of the admirable coat, the impressive mustache, and the splendid eyes is--well--my black cat. He it was who received me cordially, sat by my fire, purred a welcome, and followed me about with a tail straight as that;" and she lifted her parasol to a perpendicular.

Sometimes the talk drifted to Sir Malcolm's son, who had been the editor's friend, and whose portrait, turned to the wall, appealed with a piteous interest to Meg, and was always recurring to her mind.

"He had many faults," Mr. Standish admitted one day. "He was reckless, but there was a winsomeness about him that won hearts; and the fault he committed which rankled deepest in the old baronet's mind was an action that came nearer to a virtue."