And then that season, so important in human life and human love, was spent as Colville had promised, and to Mary supreme was the delight of wandering over all the old familiar places again and again with him--the trout-pool where they had first met and he had lifted her off the stone; the Linn; the Holyhill; the Miller's Acre; under the old gate with the legend on its lintel, and where again she could train her flowers, and feed her chickens that looked like balls of golden fluff, while the 'siller birks'--the Birks of Invermay--cast their shadows over her again. She was back again in her old groove as if she had never left it--to train her roses and clematis, to sow mignonette and sweet-scented stocks, and plant white lilies for Ellinor to paint from; and, with Jack by her side, with a solid silver collar (though one with spikes would better have suited his pugnacious propensities), to wander when dewy evening was falling, when the sheep were nibbling the grass briskly and monotonously; and a gleam came from the old ingle-lum of the kitchen, where Elspat was rolling out barley-meal cakes, and where everything spoke of home--now more than ever home! 'You see, Leslie darling,' said she, 'I feel for this place--we feel, Ellinor and I--as no one else ever could, having always, during the lifetime of papa and ever after, looked upon it as our own.' 'And your own it is, pet Mary.' 'And no other place, however grand or beautiful, could be like a home to us.' The luxuries with which Colville could surround her--luxuries too great for a mansion so small then--her carriage-horses, her pair of ponies, her white Arab pad (all stabled as yet at the 'Dunkeld Arms'), her set of sables, her jewellery, and Parisian toilettes, her retinue of servants were the topics of 'the countryside,' and were duly descanted on by Mademoiselle Rosette Patchouli for the edification of her ladies; and the Honourable Blanche Gabrielle, with her elevated eyebrows, foreign tricks of manner, and incipient little French moustache, thought with anger of all she had lost. The pompous old lord, with his facial angle _à la_ Louis XIV., and his cold-blooded yet perfectly aristocratic lady, would gladly have shed the light of their countenances over Birkwoodbrae, but there Mary's Christianity ended; and she would have nothing of them, despite all good old Dr. Wodrow could urge. Robert was returning an officer, with a well-earned cluster of medals on his breast, and he was coming straight to Kirktoun-Mailler and to her. So Ellinor often seated herself on a mossy bank, and, leaning her head of rich brown hair against the white stem of a silver birch, would give herself up to memory, and many a happy and repentant thought; while tears fell from her eyes--she was so happy!