"And what's hindering him but sloth?" asked the old lady, rushing eagerly to an old battle ground. "But there! was it not predicted as the end o' a' things. Just a great Darkness as o' Night, and that is what folks is coming to nowadays. It just beats me to roust the hussies from their beds before six. And it's no from them bein' hirelings a'together, for it's the same with the cottages. Where the peat smoke used to go up wi' the mist wreaths at the earliest blink, there's naething but an empty lum. Aye! and a cauld hearth! Not even a gathering peat to keep the warmth o' home aboot the place. But there! what could ye expec' wi' such names as they give the matches--Lucifers and Damnstickers." "My dear mother!" exclaimed Will, in horrified accents, as he lounged in lazily. "I'm no swearing, William," she retorted, with great dignity. "Tho' maybe I hae a claim to be angry an' sin not, wi' a farmer son that comes down to his breaking o' bread when the beasts have begun to chew the cud." "My dear mother!" quoth Will, good-naturedly. "You look after the beasts, and my corn is all carried." "Weel! weel! When I'm carried to me grave ye'll find the difference, even if ye get a wife. Aye, aye! I ken fine what she'll be like--just one o' the sort wi' a hump somewhere. I kenna whaur the fashion'll put it then, since 'of that hour knoweth no man,' but it will be somewheres, an' her hair will be as if a clucking hen had bin scrapin' in't." "I deny it; I deny it," laughed Will; "when I marry, I shall marry a girl just like Marjory. Only she shall not be quite so tall, or so clever, and shall be thinner, and less opinionated--more of my sort, and----" "And her hair shall be of a different colour," laughed Marjory, in her turn; "I'm glad I don't leave you heartbroken--or anyone else, either," she added, half to herself. And as she passed through her little sitting-room, before starting on her rendezvous with Paul, she paused for an instant before her letter to Tom Kennedy, which still lay unfinished, as she had left it, and looked down again on those last words. They were true still, and with a sudden impulse she took up the pen to say so. "Tom!" she wrote, "the problem is solved! Paul has come back to me, and we are going to begin a new life together. Yet, I stretch out my hands to you, dear, as I did before, and say 'Friendship is a bigger thing than love!'" Then she went gaily through the garden to pick a late carnation for Paul's buttonhole, and as she picked it she sang the "Flowers o' the Forest." "I've seen Tweed's silver streams, Glittering in the sunny beams, Grow drumly and dark as he row'd on his way."