The tune, with its haunting cadences, lingered in her mind, and more than once fell from her lips, when with a light heart she faced the ups and downs of the white road as it crept round the loch to where the bridge, spanning the river, would enable her to strike across the moss-hags to the alder-fringed bank above. And Paul would be on the other side as he had been before. But he should not jump this time, for that was one of the things she did not like; those things which she was going to take out of his life and hers. The very thought, indeed, of the risk of a slip made her shiver as she paused for a moment on the bridge, and saw the yellow-brown flood, swollen with the night's rain, rushing against the piers. "Drumly and dark!" Drumly it was, yet scarcely dark. It ran too fast for that, and up yonder, where she was to meet Paul, it would be a mass of foam with yellow lights in it. A sort of syllabub of a river pouring over the curved edge of the rock heavily. Not like water at all, but like some drugged draught; falling not with a roar or a rush, but with slow, deafening boom. The waters of Lethe might fall so, she fancied. Well! Paul should run no risk of them to-day, for she was before her time, and would be there to warn him. So thinking, she clambered down to the water's edge, and seating herself on the only level slab of rock, which projected slightly over the boiling pool below, she faced the downward course of the river, certain thus of seeing the first glimpse of her lover's tall figure above the bracken which crested the almost perpendicular rocks on the other side. "I've seen this morning." It was a most distracting tune! All the more so because the words would follow Mrs. Cameron's sentimental lead, instead of keeping to the old lament with the lilt of battle and sudden death in it. "The flowers o' the forest that fought aye the foremost, The prime o' our land are cauld in the clay." That was why they played it as a Dead March in the Highland regiments. If Paul decided not to retire, it might be played at his funeral some day. At Paul's funeral! The very thought seemed impossible; and yet the girl's heart throbbed more with pride than fear. "That fought aye the foremost." Yes! if she were a soldier's wife that was what a soldier should do, even if she had to sit "drearie, lamenting her dearie." It was too bad, she told herself, for the tune to haunt her so, since Paul would be coming soon now, and when they had first met her head had not been full of the "Flowers of the Forest" and such things; she had been reading one of Tom's letters. How foolish of her not to have brought one to complete the illusion! unless, indeed, there were, by chance, one in her pocket. Yes! a scrap of one, old enough to rouse her curiosity and engross her attention as she smoothed it out and began to read.