"I've got the easy job," he said. "Mr. Heritage will have the whole pack on him in that old Tower, and him with such a sore clout on his head. I've left him my pistol. He's a terrible brave man!" She smiled. "Ay, and he's a poet too." "So?" she said. "I did not know. He is very young." "He's a man of very high ideels." She puzzled at the word, and then smiled. "I know him. He is like many of our young men in Russia, the students--his mind is in a ferment and he does not know what he wants. But he is brave." This seemed to Dickson's loyal soul but a chilly tribute. "I think he is in love with me," she continued. He looked up startled and saw in her face that which gave him a view into a strange new world. He had thought that women blushed when they talked of love, but her eyes were as grave and candid as a boy's. Here was one who had gone through waters so deep that she had lost the foibles of sex. Love to her was only a word of ill omen, a threat on the lips of brutes, an extra battalion of peril in an army of perplexities. He felt like some homely rustic who finds himself swept unwittingly into the moonlight hunt of Artemis and her maidens. "He is a romantic," she said. "I have known so many like him." "He's no' that," said Dickson shortly. "Why, he used to be aye laughing at me for being romantic. He's one that's looking for truth and reality, he says, and he's terrible down on the kind of poetry I like myself." She smiled. "They all talk so. But you, my friend Dickson" (she pronounced the name in two staccato syllables ever so prettily), "you are different. Tell me about yourself." "I'm just what you see--a middle-aged retired grocer." "Grocer?" she queried. "Ah, yes, _epicier_. But you are a very remarkable _epicier_. Mr. Heritage I understand, but you and those little boys--no. I am sure of one thing--you are not a romantic. You are too humorous and--and----I think you are like Ulysses, for it would not be easy to defeat you." Her eyes were kind, nay affectionate, and Dickson experienced a preposterous rapture in his soul, followed by a sinking, as he realised how far the job was still from being completed. "We must be getting on, Mem," he said hastily, and the two plunged again into the heather. The Ayr road was crossed, and the fir wood around the Mains became visible, and presently the white gates of the entrance. A wind-blown spire of smoke beyond the trees proclaimed that the house was not untenanted. As they entered the drive the Scots firs were tossing in the gale, which blew fiercely at this altitude, but, the dwelling itself being more in the hollow, the daffodil clumps on the lawn were but mildly fluttered.