Clementina was merry as a child. All was so safe and peaceful with her fisherman! She would not hear of returning: they must have a walk in the moonlight first. So down the steps and the winding path into the valley of the burn, and up to the flower-garden, they wandered, Clementina telling him how sick the moonlight had made her feel that night she met him first on the Boar's Tail, when his words concerning her revived the conviction that he loved Florimel. At the great stone basin Malcolm set the swan spouting, but the sweet musical jargon of the falling water seemed almost coarse in the soundless diapason of the moonlight. So he stopped it again, and they strolled farther up the garden. Clementina venturing to remind him of the sexton-like gardener's story of the lady and the hermit's cave, which, because of its Scotch, she was unable to follow, Malcolm told her now what John Jack had narrated, adding that the lady was his own mother, and that from the gardener's tale he learned that morning at length how to account for the horror which had seized him on his first entering the cave, as also for his father's peculiar carriage on that occasion: doubtless he then caught a likeness in him to his mother. He then recounted the occurrence circumstantially. "I have ever since felt ashamed of the weakness," he concluded; "but at this moment I believe I could walk in with perfect coolness." "We won't try it to-night," said Clementina, and once more turned him from the place, reverencing the shadow he had brought with him from the spirit of his mother. They walked and sat and talked in the moonlight, for how long neither knew; and when the moon went behind the trees on the cliff, and the valley was left in darkness, but a darkness that seemed alive with the new day soon to be born, they sat yet, lost in a peaceful unveiling of hearts, till a sudden gust of wind roused Malcolm, and looking up he saw that the stars were clouded, and knew that the chill of the morning was drawing near. He kept that chamber just as it was ever after, and often retired to it for meditation. He never restored the ruinous parts of the stair, and he kept the door at the top carefully closed. But he cleared out the rubbish that choked the place where the stair had led lower down, came upon it again in tolerable preservation a little beneath, and followed it into a passage that ran under the burn, appearing to lead in the direction of the cave behind the Baillies' Barn. Doubtless there was some foundation for the legend of Lord Gernon.