Maisie smiled a little, indulgently, leaning back so that her friend's dark eyes should not notice it. She smiled as one who is in the things of love at least a thousand years older, and who in her day has seen and tasted bread sweet and bread bitter. "And certainly you do well to hate him, my Kate," this cunning Mistress Maisie said, very gently, her hand continuing to run softly through the meshes of Kate's curls; "nevertheless, for all that you are glad that he kissed you." The girl lifted her head as quickly from its resting-place as though a needle had pricked her unawares. She eyed her friend with a grave, shocked surprise. "You were listening!" she said. And the censure in her tone might have been that of a General Assembly of the Kirk, so full of weighty rebuke was it. "No, Kate," said her friend, quietly. "I was in the kitchen all the time, putting the bone in the broth for William's supper. I heard no single word of your talk. But, Kate, my lassie, I am not so very ignorant concerning these things which you stand on the brink of. Come, what had you been saying to him to provoke him to kiss you?" "He but asked me for a love-token to take with him to the wars--which I gave him, and how could I tell?" said the girl, a little plaintively. Things had not gone as they ought, and now her own familiar friend was about to blame her for it. Maisie waited a moment discreetly, hoping that Kate would go on; but she appeared to consider that she had said enough. She only pillowed her head lower on her gossip's knee, and submitted contentedly to the loving hand which caressed her ringlets. "And you gave him the love-token?" queried her friend, quietly. "I told him that I had nothing of my own to give him, because my baggage had not yet arrived; and it chanced that I saw one of your old marrowless gloves lying there on the cabinet--so I gave him that. I thought," she added, plaintively, after a pause, "that it would do just as well." At which conclusion Maisie laughed helplessly, rocking to and fro; then she checked herself, and began again. Kate raised her head and looked at her in new surprise. "You are the strangest girl!" at last Maisie said. "You have sundry passages with a gallant youth. You smile not unkindly upon him. You quarrel and are separated. After years you meet in a distant land. He asks you for a gage to carry with him to the wars, a badge fragrant of his lady and his love, and you give him--an odd glove of his cousin's wife's. Truly an idea most quaint and meritorious!" "And Maisie," said Kate, solemnly, looking up at her with her head still on her hands, "would you believe it? He stamped his foot and threw the glove out of the window there into the canal! He ought not to have done that, ought he?" "My Kate," said her friend, "do not forget that I am no longer a girl, but a woman wedded--" "Six months," interrupted Kate McGhie, a little mischievously.