"I must think for you as well as for myself," she said, in a scarcely audible voice. "Give me time. Give me till the end of the week." "At this hour I will come." "And you will believe I have decided for the best--that I have tried hard to be fair to you as well as myself?" "I know you are too true a woman for anything else," he said; and then he added, "Ah, well, now, you have had enough misery for one morning; you must dry your eyes now, and we will go out into the garden; and if I am not to say anything of all my gratitude to you--why? Because I hope there will be many a year to do that in, my angel of goodness!" She went to fetch a light shawl and a hat; he kept turning over the things on the table, his fingers trembling, his eyes seeing nothing. If they did see anything, it was a vision of the brown moors near Castle Dare, and a beautiful creature, clad all in cream-color and scarlet, drawing near the great gray stone house. She came into the room again; joy leaped to his eyes. "Will you follow me?" There was a strangely subdued air about her manner as she led him to where her father was; perhaps she was rather tired after the varied emotions she had experienced; perhaps she was still anxious. He was not anxious. It was in a glad way that he addressed the old gentleman who stood there with a spade in his hand. "It is indeed a beautiful garden," Macleod said, looking round on the withered leaves and damp soil; "no wonder you look after it yourself." "I am not gardening," the old man said, peevishly. "I have been putting a knife in the ground--burying the hatchet, you might call it. Fancy! A man sees an old hunting-knife in a shop at Gloucester--a hunting-knife of the time of Charles I., with a beautifully carved ivory handle; and he thinks he will make a present of it to me. What does he do but go and have it ground, and sharpened, and polished until if looks like something sent from Sheffield the day before yesterday!" "You ought to be very pleased, pappy, you got it at all," said Gertrude White; but she was looking elsewhere, and rather absently too. "And so you have buried it to restore the tone?" "I have," said the old gentleman, marching off with the shovel to a sort of out house. Macleod speedily took his leave. "Saturday next at noon," said he to her, with no timidity in his voice. "Yes," said she, more gently, and with downcast eyes. He walked away from the house--he knew not whither. He saw nothing around him. He walked hard, sometimes talking to himself. In the afternoon he found himself in a village in Berkshire, close by which, fortunately, there was a railway station; and he had just time to get back to keep his appointment with Major Stuart. They sat down to dinner. "Come, now, Macleod, tell me where you have been all day," said the rosy-faced soldier, carefully tucking his napkin under his chin. Macleod burst out laughing.