With these words still ringing in my ears I rapped at Nancy's door on my way to bed, to find her sitting by a glaring light with the everlasting Burns book in her hand. I was a bit dashed in spirit by her occupation, for it seemed unnatural that a girl should be spending the time immediately after her betrothal in such an employ, and I affected a gaiety I was far from feeling. "Is it to Nancy Stair or the possible Countess of Glenmore that I speak?" She stood by the table, her finger still marking her place in the book. "Dandy told you, then?" she asked. "Told us!" I echoed. "It's my opinion he'll tell the town-crier to-night and have it in all the prints of the realm within the week." "He told you just what the understanding was?" I repeated what he had said, and she nodded at the end in acquiescence. "You see," she said, coming toward me and putting her head on my shoulder, "I'm not sure of myself. My mind's ill redd up for marriage with any one. I've had too much freedom, perhaps; and while one side of my nature, probably the strongest one, loves Danvers Carmichael, I am drawn to the writer of these lines, this Burns man, in a way I can not tell; and at the very foot of the matter I am mightily taken up with the power of John Montrose. It's no highly moral, is it?" she asked, with an amused smile, "to feel ye could be in love with two--three men at once? But my nature's many sided, and on one of these sides I find a most 'treacherous inclination' toward his Grace of Borthwicke." CHAPTER XII I MEET A GREAT MAN "With knowledge so vast and with judgment so strong No man with the half of them e'er could go wrong; With passion so potent, and fancies so bright, No man with the half of them e'er could go right." I passed as miserable a night as my worst enemy could have wished and was up at the dawning for a jaunt in the open. The gowans so white and bonny were swinging their dewy heads in the morning wind; the sea-fog was lifting skyward, and whether the message came from them I can not say, but a mystical white word floated between me and my troubled thoughts of Nancy--a word which means the changing of baser metal into pure gold, the returning of the balance to nature, the fine adjustment of spirit to mind and body--the great word Motherhood. Nancy as a mother. My Little Flower with a floweret of her own might be the solution of a happy marriage for her more than compensating for the independence and adulation which she had always had. As I tramped along I came to a definite thought concerning the Burns poems as well, which was that I would set fire to them, as if by accident, that very day, and have them by and done with. And as for the man himself, it would, I thought, be no hard matter to keep him out of our lives; in which conclusions I left out just two things--the throw of Fate, which none of us can reckon upon, and my own rhyme-loving nature and fondness for being entertained.