It was a night of exceeding calm, with the moon, that I had seen as a corn-hook over my warfare with MacLachlan in Tarra-dubh, swollen to the full and gleaming upon the country till it shone as in the dawn of day. We walked back and forth on the hunting-road, for long in a silence broken by few words. My mind was in a storm. I felt that I was losing my friend, and that, by itself, was trouble; but I felt, likewise, a shame that the passion of love at my bosom robbed the deprivation of much of its sorrow. “I shall kiss her to-night if she spurns me for ever,” I said to myself over and over again, and anon I would marvel at my own daring; but the act was still to do. It was more than to do--it was to be led up to, and yet my lady kept every entrance to the project barred, with a cunning that yet astounds me. We had talked of many things in our evening rambles in that wood, but never of M’Iver, whose name the girl shunned mention of for a cause I knew but could never set her right on. This night, his last in our midst, I ventured on his name. She said nothing for a little, and for a moment I thought, “Here’s a dour, little, unforgiving heart!” Then, softly, said she, “I wish him well and a safe return from his travelling. I wish him better than his deserts. That he goes at all surprises me. I thought it but John Splendid’s promise--to be acted on or not as the mood happened.” “Yes,” I said; “he goes without a doubt. I saw him to-day kiss his farewells with half-a-dozen girls on the road between the Maltland and the town.” “I daresay,” she answered; “he never lacked boldness.” My chance had come. “No, indeed, he did not,” said I; “and I wish I had some of it myself.” “What! for so common a display of it?” she asked, rallying, yet with some sobriety in her tone. “Not a bit,” I answered; “that--that--that I might act the part of a lover with some credit to myself, and kiss the one girl I know in that capacity.” “Would she let you?” she asked, removing herself by a finger-length from my side, yet not apparently enough to show she thought herself the one in question. “That, madame, is what troubles me,” I confessed in anguish, for her words had burst the bubble of my courage. “Of course you cannot tell till you try,” she said, demurely, looking straight before her, no smile on the corners of her lips, that somehow maddened by their look of pliancy. “You know whom I mean,” I said, pursuing my plea, whose rustic simplicity let no man mock at, remembering the gawky errors of his own experience. “There’s Bell, the minister’s niece, and there’s Kilblaan’s daughter, and----”