"So that's where it went?" said Ralph, smiling gladly.

"Yes," said Winsome, blushing not so much with guilt as with the consciousness of the locality of the note-book at that moment, which she was not yet prepared to tell him. But she consoled herself with the thought that she would tell him one day.

Strangely however, Ralph did not seem to care much about the book, so Winsome changed the subject to one of greater interest.

"And what else did you think about me that first day?--tell me,"

said Winsome, shamelessly.

It was Ralph's opportunity.

"Why, you know very well, Winsome dear, that ever since the day I first saw you I have thought that there never was any one like you--"

"Yes?" said Winsome, with a rising inflection in her voice.

"I ever thought you the best and the kindest--"

"Yes?" said Winsome, a little breathlessly.

"The most helpful and the wisest--"

"Yes?" said Winsome.

"And the most beautiful girl I have ever seen in my life!"

"Then I do not care for anything else!" cried Winsome, clapping her hands. She had been resolving to learn Hebrew five minutes before.

"Nor do I, really," said Ralph, speaking out the inmost soul that is in every young man.

As Ralph Peden sat looking at Winsome the thought came sometimes to him--but not often--"This is Allan Welsh's daughter, the daughter of the woman whom my father once loved, who lies so still under the green sod of Crossthwaite beneath the lea of Skiddaw."

He looked at her eyes, deep blue like the depths of the Mediterranean Sea, and, like it, shot through with interior light.

"What are you thinking of?" asked Winsome, who had also meanwhile been looking at him.

"Of your eyes, dear!" said Ralph, telling half the truth--a good deal for a lover.

Winsome paused for further information, looking into the depths of his soul. Ralph felt as though his heart and judgment were being a.s.saulted by storming parties. He looked into these wells of blue and saw the love quivering in them as the broken light quivers, deflected on its way through clear water to a sea bottom of golden sand.

"You want to hear me tell you something wiser," said Ralph, who did not know everything; "you are bored with my foolish talk."

And he would have spoken of the hopes of his future.

"No, no; tell me--tell me what you see in my eyes," said Winsome, a little impatiently.

"Well then, first," said truthful Ralph, who certainly did not flinch from the task, "I see the fairest thing G.o.d made for man to see. All the beauty of the world, losing its way, stumbled, and was drowned in the eyes of my love. They have robbed the sunshine, and stolen the morning dew. The sparkle of the light on the water, the gladness of a child when it laughs because it lives, the sunshine which makes the b.u.t.terflies dance and the world so beautiful--all these I see in your eyes."

"This story is plainly impossible. This practical girl was not one to find pleasure in listening to flattery. Let us read no more in this book." This is what some wise people will say at this point.

So, to their loss will they close the book. They have not achieved all knowledge. The wisest woman would rather hear of her eyes than of her mind. There are those who say the reverse, but then perhaps no one has ever had cause to tell them concerning what lies hid in their eyes.

Many had wished to tell Winsome these things, but to no one hitherto had been given the discoverer's soul, the poet's voice, the wizard's hand to bring the answering love out of the deep sea of divine possibilities in which the tides ran high and never a lighthouse told of danger.

"Tell me more," said Winsome, being a woman, as well as fair and young. These last are not necessary; to desire to be told about one's eyes, it is enough to be a woman.

Ralph looked down. In such cases it is necessary to refresh the imagination constantly with the facts. As in the latter days wise youths read messages from the quivering needle of the talking machine, so Ralph read his message flash by flash as it pulsated upward from a pure woman's soul.

"Once you would not tell me why your eyelashes were curled up at the ends," said this eager Columbus of a new continent, drawing the new world nearer his heart in order that his discoveries might be truer, surer, in detail more trustworthy. "I know now without telling. Would you like to know, Winsome?"

Winsome drew a happy breath, nestling a little closer--so little that no one but Ralph would have known. But the little shook him to the depths of his soul. This it is to be young and for the first time mastering the geography of an unknown and untraversed continent. The unversed might have thought that light breath a sigh, but no lover could have made the mistake. It is only in books, wordy and unreal, that lovers misunderstand each other in that way.

"I know," said Ralph, needing no word of permission to proceed, "it is with touching your cheek when you sleep."

"Then I must sleep a very long time!" said Winsome merrily, making light of his words.

"Underneath in the dark of either eye," continued Ralph, who, be it not forgotten, was a poet, "I see two young things like cherubs."

"I know," said Winsome; "I see myself in your eyes--you see yourself in mine."

She paused to note the effect of this tremendous discovery.

"Then," replied Ralph, "if it be indeed my own self I see in your eyes, it is myself as G.o.d made me at first without sin. I do not feel at all like a cherub now, but I must have been once, if I ever was like what I see in your eyes."

"Now go on; tell me what else you see," said Winsome.

"Your lips--" began Ralph, and paused.

"No, six is quite enough," said Winsome, after a little while, mysteriously. She had only two, and Ralph only two; yet she said with little grammar and no sense at all, "Six is enough."

But a voice from quite other lips came over the rising background of scrub and tangled thicket.

"Gang on coortin'," it said; "I'm no lookin', an' I canna see onything onyway."

It was Jock Gordon. He continued:

"Jock Scott's gane hame till his breakfast. He'll no bother ye this mornin', sae coort awa'."

CHAPTEE x.x.xV.

SUCH SWEET SORROW.

WINSOME and Ralph laughed, but Winsome sat up and put straight her sunbonnet. Sunbonnets are troublesome things. They will not stick on one's head. Manse Bell contradicts this. She says that her sunbonnet never comes off, or gets pushed back. As for other people's, la.s.ses are not what they were in her young days.

"I must go home," said Winsome; "they will miss me."

"You know that it is 'good-bye,' then," said Ralph.

"What!" said Winsome, "shall I not see you to-morrow?" the bright light of gladness dying out of her eye. And the smile drained down out of her cheek like the last sand out of the sand-gla.s.s.

"No," said Ralph quietly, keeping his eyes full on hers, "I cannot go back to the manse after what was said. It is not likely that I shall ever be there again."