"No, Tom!" she wrote; "I am not growing morbid. I am not, as you call it, trying to measure my world with home-made imitations of the imperial quart; still, I do wish I knew what the cubit was! Then I would add it to my stature and rise superior--perhaps. If I had known what I know now when my holiday began would it have made any difference? If I had had a mother, if I had been brought up with other girls, should I have gone on as I did, using a wrong terminology? I will tell you something, Tom. What I thought was love in those old days is just what I feel for you, dear. Perhaps I might have thought so all my life if I had not met him. And now, if I meet him again, Tom, what will happen? I sit down before the proposition; but it is not to be solved like a problem in Euclid, because I have discovered that my heart and my brain are quite separate, and I used to think they were both a part of me. Don't tell me, please, that I am wrong. Perhaps I am physiologically. I know all about that horrid little V-shaped spot in the _medulla oblongata_, isn't it, where a pin-point will stop Tears and Laughter, Love and Friendship for ever. What then? Does it make it easier to understand why the heart beats, to know that we can stop its beating? I wish I knew! I wish I knew! I don't want it to beat, but it will. Oh! what a mercy it is that we two do not love each other!" She laid down the pen as a knock came to the door. "A strange shentlemen to see Miss Carmichael," said the new servant who had replaced the peccant Kirsty discovered--direful offence--in putting a dirty skimmer into the milk. Now, in the country a "strange gentleman" generally resolves itself into the piano-tuner, so Marjory bade him be shown up with a certain calm impatience at the necessity for explaining that his services would not be wanted; then, the thread of her thoughts broken rudely, she sate waiting, her eyes fixed absently on the words, "that we two do not love each other!" She looked up from them to see Paul Macleod standing at the door. He had come back to her! Five minutes before she had asked, almost passionately, of her friend what she would do in such case. Now there was but one answer. "Paul!" Her outstretched hand sought his, as he stood tall and straight trying to master his emotion, to preserve the calm to which he had schooled himself through the long journey which had ended here--here, where he might once have found rest; here, where all, save such self-respect as apology might leave him, was lost for ever. "Paul--Oh! how tired you look--how cold your hands are! Come, dear--come and warm yourself; you must be perished!" He did not speak, perhaps because the hoar frost of pride which had chilled his eyes melted before the radiance of hers; and hoar frost is but water after all. So she drew him to the fire, and then, still holding one hand as if loth to lose touch of it, knelt on one knee to stir the peats to a brighter blaze.