“Ah, it’s likely,” Macgregor replied, and turned into the close, glad to escape. “Haud on!” cried Willie. “What?” Macgregor halted with reluctance. Willie sniggered. “I seen ye wi’ Jessie Mary the ither nicht.” “Did ye?” retorted Macgregor feebly. “Ay; an’ if I was you, I wud let girls alane. They’re nae fun, an’ they’re awfu’ expensive.” With which sage advice Willie walked off. Macgregor made up his mind not to leave the house that evening, yet eight o’clock found him at the foot of the street wherein Jessie Mary lived. But he did not go up the street, and at the end of five minutes he strolled the way he had taken two hours earlier. As he approached a certain shop the light in its window went out. He marched home quickly, looking neither right nor left. * * * * * On the following evening he hired a small boy for the sum of one halfpenny to deliver the package to Jessie Mary at her abode, and straightway returned to the parental fireside, where he blushed at the welcome accorded him. That night, however, fate willed it that John Robinson should run out of tobacco. Macgregor, who had been extremely restless, expressed himself ready to step down to the tobacco shop in the main street. Here it must be mentioned that the gifts had reached Jessie Mary at precisely the right moment. They had raised her spirits from the depths of despair to at least the lower heights of hope. Only an hour before their arrival she had learned how the young man with the exquisite moustache had treacherously invited another young lady to accompany him to the Ironmongers’ dance; and although to the ordinary mind this may appear to have been the simple result of a lack of superhuman patience on the young man’s part, Jessie Mary could perceive in it nothing but the uttermost perfidy. So that until the arrival of Macgregor’s present――“to J. M. from M. with best wishes” (an “l” had been scraped out where the second “w” now stood)――she had felt like tearing the pink frock to tatters and preparing for the tomb. * * * * * They met near the tobacconist’s――on Macgregor’s home side, by the way――and he could not have looked more guilty had he sent her an infernal machine. “It was awful kind o’ ye,” she said sweetly; “jist _awful_ kind.” “Aw, it was naething,” he stammered. “They’re jist lovely, an’ that fashionable,” she went on, and gradually led the conversation to the subject of the United Ironmongers’ dance. “Ye should come,” she said, “an’ see hoo nice I look wi’ them on. The belt’ll be lovely wi’ ma pink frock. An’ the combs was surely made for black hair like mines. Of course I tried them on the minute I got them.” “Did ye?” murmured Macgregor. Where was all the feverish joy, the soft rapture anticipated three nights ago? “Did ye?”――that was all he said.