So I told her, very quietly, about Nort's visit to me and some of the things he said. She sat very still, her hands lying in her lap, her eyes on some shadowy spot far across the garden. I paused, wondering how much I dared tell. "I don't know, Anthy, that I was doing right," I said, "but I wanted him to know something of you as you really are. So I told him about your letters to Lincoln, and showed him one of them." She flushed deeply. "You _couldn't_, David!" "Yes, I did--and that may explain why he's reading the life of Lincoln. Maybe he's trying to imitate Lincoln." "Imitate Lincoln----" The sound of her voice as she said these words I think will never go quite out of my memory: it was so soft and deep, so tremulous. And then something happened that I cannot fully explain, nor think of without a thrill. Anthy turned quickly toward me, looked at me through shiny tears, and put her head quickly and impulsively down upon my shoulder. "Oh, David," she said, "I love you!" But I knew well what she meant. It was that great moment in a woman's life when in loving the loved one she loves all the world. She was not thinking that moment of me, dear though I might have been to her as a friend, but of Nort--of Nort. It was only a moment, and then she leaned quickly back, looking at me with starry eyes and a curious trembling lift of the lips. "But David," she said, "I don't _want_ him like Lincoln." The thought must have raised in her mind some vision of the sober-sided Nort of the last few weeks, for she began to laugh again. I cannot describe it, for it was a laughter so compounded of tenderness, joy, sympathy, amusement, that it fairly set one's heart to vibrating. There was no part of Anthy--sweet, strong, loving--that was not in that laugh. "I don't _want_ him like Lincoln," she said. "What do you want him like?" I asked. "Why exactly like himself, like Nort." "But I thought you rather distrusted his flightiness." She was hugging herself with her arms, and rocking a little back and forth. An odd wrinkle came in her forehead. "David, I did--I do--but somehow I like it--I love it." She paused. "It seems to me I like _everything_ about Nort." Do you realize that such beautiful things as these are going on all around us, in an evil and trouble-ridden old world? That in nearly all lives there are such perfect moments? Only we don't remember them. We grow old and wrinkled and sick; we bicker with those we love; it grows harder to remember, easier to forget. I was going to say that this was the end of the story of the _Star_ of Hempfield, but I know better, of course. It was only the beginning. "Nort, my boy, I knew it, I knew it!" said the old Captain, when Anthy and Nort told him, though as a matter of fact he had never dreamed of such a thing until two minutes before. [Illustration: Fergus stuck his small battered volume of Robert Burns's poems in his pocket--and going out of the back door struck out for the hills]