"To be disappointed in love! The phrase is arbitrarily bound up with the state of celibacy. Wherefore, my dear Marjory? wherefore? If love, as we once agreed, I think, is the touchstone of life, then marriage appears to me to be the continual essay of love, where, alas! the gold does not often reach the standard for hall marking; therefore it is conceivably better to be continually in love and not to marry. I don't know how it is, Mademoiselle Grands-serieux, but my philosophy invariably ends in paradoxes of doubtful propriety--now, doesn't it?" She looked up smiling, then rose to her feet quickly, for there was a rustle behind her. Paul might have been there ahead of her after all, and have gone up to look at the river. Yes! there was someone at the head of the fall, where the solitary rowan tree leant above the alder-bushes, for the branches swayed. "Paul!" she cried across the boom of the river, "is that you? Come down a bit; I'm here!" "I'm coming, Miss Marjory, I'm coming," answered a childish voice; "but it is the berries I'm getting for you first. It is the last I will be getting you in Gleneira, I'm thinking, and they're real beauties, whatever." Great heavens! how reckless of the boy! yet, was not recklessness in the blood? There he was, clinging to an overhanging branch; any instant he might fall, and---- "Paul!" she cried quickly, peremptorily; "come down at once. I don't want them." She saw his bright, flushed face through the sparse yellowing leaves, close to the bunch of red berries, clutched by the little brown hand. So like that picture of his mother--so like--so like Paul, too!--her Paul. Ah, God in heaven! The child had slipped. "Hold tight, Paul! Hold tight!" Vain cry! Almost before it was uttered the seething foam with the sunny glints in it had stifled his swift scream. Marjory made no sound. White, desperate, she leant over the slippery edge of the shelf, clutched at something that seethed upwards for a second, lost her balance, and was gone--in silence. The heavy foam closed over her like a snow-drift with the sun on it, and all the help the bravest heart could have given was the hope that unconsciousness might come quickly through some kindly rock, and not in the slow agony of suffocation. It was all over in a minute, for Nature knows her own mind when she is in the tragic mood. She allows no time for unavailing tears. When, not a minute afterwards, Paul Macleod's cry of "Marjory! Marjory!" with its ring of glad certainty, echoed over the pool, there was not a sign to show that she would ever give answer to his call again. "Marjory! Marjory! Marjory!" Pitiful appeal, though he knew it not, not even when a vague wonder at her tardiness clouded the careless joy which had come to him with this dawn of a new day, a new life. For the night seemed to have stolen his fears as fit companions for its shadows, and left him nothing but his hopes. "Marjory! Marjory! Marjory!"