The Reverend James Gillespie had a certain coarse fibre in him, which made it only natural that the snub direct he had received from Dr. Kennedy should make him more determined than he had been before on a _tête-a-tête_ with Marjory. Consequently, much to her disgust, she found him solemnly waiting for her on a tombstone in the old burying-ground. The spectacle was an irritating one. "Why didn't you go down with the others?" she asked crossly. "You know quite well I didn't need--anyone." A certain politeness prevented her employing the personal pronoun. Not that her lover would have cared, since he came of a class in which a certain amount of shrewishness in the wooed is not only considered correct, but, to a certain extent, propitious. And, although he had a veneer of polish on those points which had come into friction with his new world, love-making was not one of them. There he was, simply the cottier's son, full of inherited tradition in regard to rural coquetry. A fact which, at the outset, put Marjory at a disadvantage, since he refused to take the uncompromising hint, which she gave as soon as it dawned upon her what his purpose really was. And yet she could hardly refuse the man before he had asked her the momentous question. So it was with concentrated mixture of sheer wrath and intense amusement that she suddenly found him, as they paused by the wishing-well, on his knees before her declaiming his passion in set terms. The disposition to box his ears vanished in almost hysterical laughter, until the blank surprise on his face recalled her to the fact that the man was, at any rate, paying her the highest tribute in his power, and had a right to be heard. But not in that ridiculous position! "You had better get up, Mr. Gillespie," she said peremptorily; "the ground is quite damp, and I can hear what you have to say much better when you are standing." The facts were undeniable but the prosaic interruption had checked the flow of Mr. Gillespie's eloquence, and he stood red and stuttering until Marjory's slender stock of patience was exhausted, and she interrupted him, loftily: "I suppose you meant just now to ask me to be your wife? If that was so----" Her tone roused his temper. "Such was my intention," he interrupted sulkily. "I thought I spoke pretty plainly, and I fancy you must have been prepared for it." Prepared! prepared for this!--this outrage on her girlish dreams. For it was her first proposal. What right had this man to thrust himself into her holy of holies and smirch the romance--the beauty of it all? It is the feeling with which many a girl listens for the first time to a lover. "Prepared!" she echoed. "Are you mad? The very idea is preposterous!" His face was a study. "The Bishop," he began, "and Lady George didn't seem to--to think----" "Then I am to understand that you have consulted them?" she asked, in supreme anger; but his sense of duty came to his aid and made him bold.