For a specimen, then, of how she would stand against me over a wrong claim, and her skill in its defence. One morning she had drawn me off to the northward for a walk. The day was by no means sultry, and a breeze was blowing and so induced a temperature which made the exercise a joy. We were rambling through a deep valley--Peg and I--which was the home of a brawling rivulet, and making a slow journey of it, since the way, broken by boulders and sown with thickets in between, was something of the roughest. While about this pleasant toil Peg broke forth: “Do you see that vine?” Here she pointed to a creeper, luxuriant and rich, which, failing of support to climb by, ran all about on the ground. “That vine is like me. It needs a trellis--asks some tall and strong tree to clasp and love and grow upon. Given a tree to touch the heavens, that loving vine would climb upward to kiss the heavens with her tree. Wanting her tree--poor vine!--she grovels about the ground. That vine and I are the same.” To this I offered no response, for I could not see how the matter called for debate; and then her fancy was like unto a shooting star, and no one might foresee its flight or prophesy its course. However, Peg did not ask reply. Away she plunged in a new direction. “Should one control his love, to send it here or there like a dog?” “Why,” said I, “the thing is out of the question. One's love is not a creature of bit and bridle, to be guided as one guides a horse. I should say that no one controls his love, but is controlled by it.” “See there, now! A second Daniel!” cried Peg, with a little flicker of derision. For all that, I could tell how she agreed with me. She went on, “Then one is not to blame how one's love wanders, since one has it in no leading-string. Should one marry without love?” “Of a verity! no,” I retorted. “It would be to cheat the other of every chance of happiness.” “If one be not to blame,” said Peg, in a wandering way of talk, “if one be not to blame for the birth of one's love, neither should one be blamed for its death. And if one is not to marry without love, one should not continue, the wife with the husband nor he with her, when love has met its end. You yourself have shown me the wrong of that. Ah, watch-dog! am I not right?” “Now, in all my days,” said I, “I have not been made to talk so much on love. The question is above me.” “You said folk should not wed wanting love.” Peg paused to stamp her foot at me in saucy vehemence. “If that be true, then folk should not remain wedded wanting love. Do you not think, if a wife were to cease to love her husband, she should leave him? Does she not owe him that duty? And you have said, watch-dog, as you shall not forget, that her love, too, is not her fault.” “Still, I should deem it great pity,” said I, “were a wife to leave her husband.”