"There's about all there is of life in this little book, and it's made my rhyming-ware cheap. Do you think," she says, coming over to kiss me before I sent her off to bed, "do you think I can ever meet wi' Mr. Burns?" "If you want it, you shall," I said; "unless the man himself objects. We'll have him up to Stair; and now forget him and get some rest, Little Flower." She went away and left me, and I turned to sleep with that great couplet going over and over in my head like the clatter of horses' hoofs: "The heart ay's the part ay That makes us right or wrong." CHAPTER IX DANVERS BECOMES BETTER ACQUAINTED WITH NANCY There were two reasons why Danvers was able to see Nancy almost uninterruptedly the next two or three weeks, the first being that we were but late returned from London, with old ties to be formed anew; and the second, a law affair among the Burn-folk, the trouble of which took much of Nancy's time, and eventually brought into our lives the great Duke of Borthwicke, of whom I shall have more to say. These left Danvers a fair field where Nancy was concerned, and no man living ever covered his ground better or made a braver wooing. From the minute his eye lighted upon her in the doorway it seemed as though it were "all by with him," as the country folk say, for he seemed to have no thoughts but for her, with the world welcome to a knowledge of the fact. Every day the conservatories of Arran were stripped for her, hampers of fruit, and books, and notes which sent the blood rioting to her cheeks, were over every morning; and before they could be forgotten, Danvers was there in person, a handsome, passionate, dominating lover, whose nature was one I could understand and whose love-making was as headlong and impetuous as my own had been. I remember watching him bending over her one night as they stood together before going in to dinner, and Marian's words came back to me at sight of him: "For ye woo as a man should woo; and I'm won as a woman should be won--because she has no will to choose." Talk of Danvers fell between Sandy and me quite naturally at this time, and one night, when I was praising his boy to him with much enthusiasm, he answered with a laugh: "Of course you like him! Why shouldn't you? You're of a piece, the two of you. You are both primeval creatures, not far removed in your love-making from the time when men lived in caves, and if they wanted a woman they knocked her down with a club and carried her home, and the wooing was over." "Barring the knocking down," I answered, "it's not so bad a way." "That's well enough," he retorted, "where women are but gentle female animals. But take a woman with a mind or gift--such as Nancy Stair has--and ye'll find a complication in the affair not to be solved with a club."