I am not making an idle boast; I am recording a fact when I say that that girl laid siege to me with a skill and patience which filled me alternately with admiration, gratitude, and alarm. She learned my tastes, she studied my habits, she mastered my opinions, until I began to think that if a person who apparently knew me so well could like me so much, I must be an infinitely more amiable man than I had ever supposed. This frame of mind naturally led me to look kindly on the lady who had enabled me to make such a pleasing discovery, and I knew myself to be softening to such an extent that I felt that, unless Mr. Farington should leave Ballater before the summer was over, I should be 'a gone coon' before autumn. If she held on until the evenings grew cold and long, until the winds began to howl about lonely Larkhall, and to bring swirling showers of dead leaves to the ground with the hissing sound of a beach of pebbles under the retreating waves of a wintry sea, then I felt that I should give way, that I should see in Miss Farington's prosaic gray eyes pleasant domestic pictures, in her erect figure and sloping shoulders an attraction which to a lonely man, when the deer-stalking and fishing seasons were over, were quite irresistible. I had had one plaintive little letter from Babiole, in which she entreated me, in rather stiff and stilted language, out of which peeped a most touching anxiety, to beware of her father, who, she assured me, was more desperate and dangerous in his intentions to do me harm than she had even dared to suggest when face to face with me. I wrote back in a clumsy letter as stiff as her own, but not so touching, that she need have no fear, as her father had settled down quietly at Aberdeen. I dared not tell her the truth, which I had found out through Ferguson--that Mr. Ellmer had indeed come up to the Highlands with the avowed intention of doing me some desperate harm; but that, having availed himself too freely, through his daughter's generosity, of his favourite indulgences, he had had an attack of _delirium tremens_, and had been placed under restraint in the county lunatic asylum. Babiole's letter I carried about with me, and sometimes--for loneliness among the hills would make a sentimental fool of the most robust of us--I fancied that the little sheet of paper, in spite of Miss Farington and the domestic pictures, burnt into my heart.