"A part!" returned the girl, eagerly. "Not all? Now, in the novels and these plays one hears of little else. It is all hero and heroine; work, ambition, failure, success, are nowhere. It is very uninteresting--don't you think so?"

Dr. Kennedy's face was a study in humour and gravity.

"Upon my word, I don't know, my child! But most people think otherwise at some time of life. And you are a little hard, surely; you should remember that after all the love-season is generally the crisis of life's fever. Put it another way; the touchstone by which we can test the lovers' ideal;" he paused till his innate doubt made him add: "At least it should be so, though I'm afraid it isn't--not always."

She looked at him, and a troubled expression came to her eyes. "I suppose not," she said absently; "that has always been a puzzle to me.

To love, and yet not to approve, seems to me a contradiction in terms." The chips flew faster from the knot Dr. Kennedy was smoothing.

"You talk as if love were reducible to logic, but it isn't." Then the impossibility of a mutual understanding made him add more gently: "It isn't a thing you can reason about. It comes and goes as it chooses--not as you choose. That is the difficulty."

"Difficulty," echoed Marjory, raising herself with a belligerent air to clasp her hands about her knees and subside again into a half-dreamy defiance as she sate looking out over the burn to the sunlit point stretching into the blue loch. "It is manifestly unfair if it is so; only I don't think it is. Else how is it possible to hold love sacred? How is it possible to believe in it?"

"I am afraid it will be believed in to the end of the chapter all the same," replied her hearer, with a smile. "And it isn't so unfair when all is said and done, since 'a love that is tender and true and strong crowneth the life of the giver.'"

She turned on him sharply. "Where does that come from? Some extremely sentimental---- Why, Tom! I believe you wrote that--now did you? Come!

own up!"

"I might have guessed it wouldn't pa.s.s muster with a young person who has taken honours in English literature and knows the Elizabethan poets by heart," he replied gravely. "Yes! Marjory, I am responsible for that particular version of a time-honoured, crusted old sentiment.

I wrote it in delirium, or something like it--if that is any excuse."

She edged closer to him in girlish eagerness. "This is quite delightful. I never knew you wrote rhymes. I do, and burn them; but _you!_ Come, tell me the rest at once."

"Perhaps I burn them, too."

"Oh! but that is only pretence, you know, just to keep oneself in subjection. One remembers them all the same. I do. So now, once, twice, thrice!"

He gave an odd little grimace. "It was last year when I had fever," he began apologetically.

"In Paris?"

"No! They had sent me to the country, and there was a stream and some reeds. I could see them as I lay in bed, and so---- Now, mind, if once I begin to swear I won't leave off under half-a-crown!"

"I wouldn't mind giving three shillings if it were worth it; so go on, Tom, why should you be bashful?"

"Because I was delirious when I wrote it, of course," he replied; yet there was a real tremor in his voice, as he began:--

"Where the river's golden sheen floats by The plumes of the tall reeds touch the sky, Like arrows from out a quiver.

But one bends over to reach the stream, Dreaming of naught but the golden gleam, Weary for love of the river.

"'Oh, river! river! thou flowest fast; Yet leave me one kiss as thou goest past-- One kiss, to be mine for ever!'

She bent her head to the shining flood; On swept the river in careless mood, Mocking her poor endeavour.

"'Oh, river! river! give back to me Some token of all I have given to thee, To show thou art my lover!'

But the only answer to her prayer Was the shade of her own love mirrored there, With the reeds that grew above her.

"The proud reeds chid her, yet still she sighed, Wondering such love could be so denied; While ever towards the ocean, Dreaming deep dreams of that future free, The river swept on to the unknown sea, Careless of her devotion.

"A bird flew down when the sun set red, To sing his hymn from the reed's bowed head To G.o.d, the All-good Giver.

Bowed by the weight of the singing bird, At long, long last the waters stirred, As the reed's plume touched the river.

"'Oh! glad and sweet,' sang the bird, 'is Life, And Death is sweet, bringing Peace to Strife, But Love is G.o.d's best treasure.

It cometh best when it comes unsought, It giveth all, and it asketh naught, For true love hath no measure,'

"The bird flew home when its song had ceased.

The reed, from its one dear kiss released, Shall give another never; But a silver crown of dewdrops shone, Telling of true love given, not won, In the reed's bright plume for ever.

"Go forth, my song! so that all may learn Love, like the reed's, needeth no return, Save the baptism of the river.

Though the heart be sad, and the way be long, A love that is tender, and true, and strong, Crowneth the life of the giver."

Dr. Kennedy recited well; the tremor of his voice had soon pa.s.sed, and with it, apparently, all sense of the personal application of the verses; for as he sate, still whittling away at the hazel root, his keen brown face wore a half-humorous and half-puzzled look, and after a decent pause he gave an odd sort of laugh.

"It sounds pretty," he said; "but upon my word I don't know quite what I meant, and I am almost certain it was not love, not what is generally understood by love."

Marjory looked at him judgmatically. "Nonsense! Of course it was love, and what is more, Tom, I think you must have been in love when you wrote it. Now confess, were you not?"

Once again the temptation to say "Yes! with you," rose uppermost; only to meet with the old revulsion of feeling, born of the knowledge of things hidden from her, and please G.o.d! always to be so hidden. In love! Great heavens, no! if that were love. And yet, how could he answer for her nature as well as his own? For a nature which his practised eye told him was full of vitality, full of possibilities; and young, ah! so young as yet in its knowledge of itself. If he told her that he loved her and asked her to marry him, the chances were ten to one that she would say "Yes." And yet the conviction that it was so brought him no content, but only something of tender reluctance for her, of vague contempt for himself.

"In love!" he echoed. "I was in a delirium if you meant that, or near it. Temperature a hundred and five point two, and Abbeville--he was nursing me--good luck to him!--had just confessed there was not much chance; as if I hadn't known that for days!"

"And you never told me," she said, after a pause.

"No; I didn't want to bother you, and----" He looked up to see her face white, and his manner changed. "Don't, child! it's past and over--besides I have a knack of pulling through--I am sorry I mentioned it, now."

"What is it?" she asked, in a constrained voice. "I should like to know, if I may?"

"My dear! of course you may. Pyaemia; the knife slipped, that was all.

The veriest scratch. What a fool I was to mention it!"

"Don't say that," she flashed out suddenly. "Don't you know that I like to hear everything--everything----" She paused, and her quick resentment seemed to die down before a keener thought, and she sate silent for a while. "I can scarcely think what it would have meant to me," she went on, half to herself, before she turned her face to him again. "I should have been quite alone in the world then, you know, Tom."

"Until you made a home of your own, perhaps," he replied quietly, being, like most men of his temperament, somewhat given to self-torture.

"Perhaps; but it would never be the same," she said, as quietly. "It would never seem to be the haven of rest that the thought of your goodness is to me now. Do you know, Tom, that I always hearten myself up by saying that if I am tired I can always ask you to let me rest, and you would, wouldn't you?" As she spoke she stretched out her hand towards him in her favourite gesture of appeal, and both of his, leaving their work, had reached to it eagerly and clasped it close.

"Marjory!" he said, a surge of sheer happiness flooding heart and brain with unalloyed content. "Promise me that always--and--and I am satisfied."

"Promise what?" she asked, smiling through the sudden tears which brightened her eyes. "That I will come home to rest if I am tired? Of course I shall. What is the use of having you, Tom, the best, the kindest, if I don't make use of you? And I will. I'll come home fast enough, you'll see, if----" She paused to give a wise shake of her head, and then, clasping the hand he had released over the other which lay upon her knee, she looked out absently over the running water at her feet.

"I wonder how I shall like it?" she continued. "I wonder if it will be what I have fancied it?"

"Probably not," replied her companion, with a quick dread at his heart. For how could it be so? What could this girl's imagining have to do with that world which he knew so well: so well that the finer tissue in him rebelled against the teaching which his very profession forced him to accept as true, at any rate for the majority of men and women. "Probably not," he repeated more quietly, "though that is just the sort of thing it is impossible to predict of a girl who has been brought up as you have. So it must be settled by experience."

Half an hour afterwards Paul Macleod, coming over to the Lodge on the pretence of giving notice of an afternoon rehearsal, found them still busy over the loves and woes of Henri and Blanche. In fact, Dr.

Kennedy was on his knees disclaiming his part pa.s.sionately; whereat the newcomer frowned. First at the sight, secondly at his own dislike to it.

"I have been trying to teach Miss Carmichael how to refuse an aspirant firmly, yet sympathetically," said the doctor, coolly, rising to his feet and putting the handkerchief he had spread on the ground into his pocket; "but she finds a difficulty, apparently, in keeping her countenance. It is a mistake, Marjory. Half the unhappy marriages in the world come from the difficulty which the untutored mind has in saying 'No' with decent courtesy. It is so much easier to say 'Yes,'

since that requires no diplomacy. If I had daughters I should always impress on them that the eleventh commandment does not consist in 'Thou shalt not refuse.'"