At first she was half alarmed at the new mood I was in, shrinking from this, my open revelation, and yet, I could see, not unpleased altogether that she should be the cause of a change so much to my advantage. I began to find a welcome in her smile and voice when I called on the household of an afternoon or evening, on one pretext or another, myself ashamed sometimes at the very flimsiness of them. She would be knitting by the fire perhaps, and it pleased me greatly by some design of my conversation to make her turn at once her face from the flames whose rosiness concealed her flushing, and reveal her confusion to’the yellow candle-light. Oh! happy days. Oh! times so gracious, the spirit and the joy they held are sometimes with me still. We revived, I think, the glow of that meeting on the stair when I came home from Germanie, and the hours passed in swallow flights as we talked of summer days gone bye. At last we had even got the length of walking together in an afternoon or evening in the wood behind the town that has been the haunt in courting days of generations of our young people: except for a little melancholy in my lady, these were perhaps life’s happiest periods. The wind might be sounding and the old leaves flying in the wood, the air might chill and nip, but there was no bitterness for us in the season’s chiding. To-day, an old man, with the follies of youth made plain and contemptible, I cannot but think those eves in the forest had something precious and magic for memory. There is no sorrow in them but that they are no more, and that the world to come may have no repetition. How the trees, the tall companions, communed together in their heights among the stars! how the burns tinkled in the grasses and the howlets mourned. And we, together, walked sedate and slowly in those evening alleys, surrounded by the scents the dews bring forth, shone upon by silver moon and stars. To-day, in my eld, it amuses me still that for long I never kissed her. I had been too slow of making a trial, to venture it now without some effort of spirit; and time after time I had started on our stately round of the hunting-road with a resolution wrought up all the way from my looking-glass at Elrigmore, that this should be the night, if any, when I should take the liberty that surely our rambles, though actual word of love had not been spoken, gave me a title to. A title! I had kissed many a bigger girl before in a caprice at a hedge-gate. But this little one, so demurely walking by my side, with never so much as an arm on mine, her pale face like marble in the moonlight, her eyes, when turned on mine, like dancing points of fire---Oh! the task defied me! The task I say--it was a duty, I’ll swear now, in the experience of later years. I kissed her first on the night before M’Iver set out on his travels anew, no more in the camp of Argile his severed chief, but as a Cavalier of the purchased sword.